In a new interview, Charlize Theron is opening up about why back in the day, as a newly-minted Oscar winner, she did something most others would never do (at the time) — join a comedy TV series.

After winning the Academy Award for Monster in 2004, the actress admits she knew her next movie, Aeon Flux, was going to be a career killer. She could tell during shooting that things were not going well, but she didn’t have the know-how to help fix the issues. So she needed something else on her resume to divert attention away, which made it an easy decision to take on the role of Michael Bluth’s (Jason Bateman) love interest in the 2005-2006 season of Arrested Development.

Theron tells The Hollywood Reporter, “I just f***ing loved [Arrested Development], and this is going to sound so ‘poor me,’ but I do feel like sometimes, as women, we get one shot, and I knew that [the 2005 action flick] Aeon Flux was going to be a f***ing flop. I knew it from the beginning. That’s why I did Arrested Development.”

Everett Collection

The actress also wanted to move her image in a lighter direction after doing so many serious films (like playing a serial killer in the aforementioned Monster), and because people knew the story of her mother killing her father in self-defense. “I needed that, to put myself out there in a different way, because people thought of me as someone who was f***ing depressing like my mother shot my father,” she says.

As for Aeon Flux, Theron is still unsure of how she could’ve helped the film turn out better. She admits, “I wasn’t a producer on it, and I didn’t really have the experience to say what I believe Tom Cruise has maybe said for the past 20 years, which is, ‘Shut this shit down, get four more writers on it and let’s figure this out.’ Instead, I’m going, ‘Oh God, I’ve just got to get through this day, I have bronchitis, but let’s keep shooting.’ Now I imagine all these male actors going, ‘Shut it down for six months!’ And it’s like, f**k, no one told me that was an option.”