Apex Director Made Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton Earn Every Bruise in a Gritty Netflix Action Thriller

Charlize Theron versus the outback and a human monster. That is Apex in a nutshell, and it looks brutal on screen because it was apparently brutal to make.

The setup

Theron plays a grieving rock climber pushing herself to the limit in the Australian wilderness when she’s targeted by a relentless killer named Ben. That hunter is Taron Egerton, taking a sharp left turn from his usual hero lane (Kingsman, Robin Hood, Carry-On) to play a genuinely sadistic predator.

Who’s steering this?

Baltasar Kormakur is behind the camera — the guy who thrives on putting actors through the wringer in both action (Contraband, 2 Guns) and survival stories (Everest, Adrift, Beast). He did not downshift here. As he put it:

"The environment, the geography where you make the film, it starts to inform the story and vice versa. Space and weather and landscape are a character in films. It’s very important to me to use it. I try to drag the cast through hell — because they have to experience it!"

Theron says he led from the front:

"He was always the first one to f***ing do the craziest thing that he was asking us to do."

What they put themselves through

Egerton had to push past a big personal hurdle: being rigged up high. He doesn’t normally blink at heights, but hanging from a wire with a free fall baked in is another beast. He agreed to try it — and yeah, he was petrified — because Kormakur asked for the real thing. That tracks with the goal here: make the landscape and the danger feel physical, not theoretical.

Egerton goes dark

It’s a rare villain turn for him, and Kormakur wanted the performance to feel unsettling from the inside out — his word to Egerton was to find the creep within. The actor kept Ben’s backstory mostly in the shadows, hinting at a very bad end to a relationship with his mother but avoiding a neat diagnosis. Or as Egerton puts it:

"The scariest things in life are always the corners that aren’t well lit... the moment you start to spell all of that out and be prescriptive about the character’s pathology, you lose something of the enigma."

Bottom line

Nature vs. Theron vs. Egerton, with a director who specializes in turning weather into a weapon. If you like your survival thrillers scraped raw, this one is aiming straight for that nerve.

• Title: Apex
• Where to watch: Netflix
• Release date: April 24, 2026
• Director: Baltasar Kormakur (Contraband, 2 Guns, Everest, Adrift, Beast)
• Starring: Charlize Theron; Taron Egerton as Ben
• Premise: A grieving rock climber fighting the elements is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a ruthless killer