Sitting beautifully poised at a table in the salubrious upstairs bar of Berlin’s Soho House, South African-born actress Charlize Theron is recalling the one time in her life that she actually threw a physical punch at someone.

“I’ve only had one fight in my life,” she admits, cringing at the memory. “I can’t even call it a fight. It wasn’t really a fight. I, very clumsily, when I was young, I got into an altercation with a girl at a bar and, before I knew it, I threw a punch.”

The 41-year-old Oscar-winner laughs. “But it was not like Lorraine at all. In my head I thought it was that. No, I was shaking and can remember going, ‘Did I just do that?’ But that was my only kind of young, stupid moment where I punched a girl.”

The Lorraine she speaks of is deadly MI6 secret agent Lorraine Broughton, her character in the new David Leitch-directed action thriller Atomic Blonde (based on Antony Johnston and Sam Hart’s bestselling 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City). Sent alone into chaotic Berlin just after the fall of the Wall in 1989, Broughton’s dual mission is to solve the murder of a fellow British spy, and also to retrieve a priceless dossier listing the names of all the double agents who’ve been working in the city throughout the Cold War.

Slick, stylised and seriously blood-soaked, the movie opens with a naked Theron bathing her badly battered and bruised body in a bathtub full of ice-cubes. We learn via a series of ultra-violent flashbacks just how she got herself into such a state: mainly by kicking, punching, stabbing, head-butting, electrocuting and otherwise laying waste to a series of male attackers, flipping them over and hurling them down stairwells, through windows and into walls.

Featuring at least one brilliantly choreographed fight scene every five minutes, Atomic Blonde – which also stars James McEvoy, Sofia Boutella, John Goodman and Toby Jones – is a seriously physical film.

“I did two movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his stunt double,” director Leitch told the New York Times recently. “Charlize trained as hard as he’s ever trained. Not to disparage Jean-Claude, who’s great, but he didn’t have a martial arts background, and went in at ground zero. She had the will to want to be great right off the bat.”

It’s hardly surprising. While she might have made her name with somewhat less aggressive roles (barring, of course, her Academy Award-winning turn as a female serial killer in 2003’s Monster), repositioning herself as a female action hero seems like the next logical step for an actress whose recent roles include the one-armed warrior Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and the fully empowered Cipher in the most recent Fast And Furious flick.

“You know, I honestly don’t think it’s an action thing,” she says, shrugging. “I think that there’s a little nostalgia for me in wanting to do storytelling in the physical sense, which is what my first career was: I was a ballerina for most of my life. That’s how I was taught to tell a story. And I’m still somewhat in love with that, and this is another way for me to experience it.

“I’ve been very lucky to have brave people like Mad Max director George Miller back me in that,” she continues. “I don’t think I could have made this movie the way we did with so little dialogue, if I hadn’t experienced Mad Max and saw the power in stripping away words. That doesn’t mean a big fight scene, but it’s how the characters carry themselves.”

She throws back her head and laughs.

“I think it’s the old broken dancer in me that still wants to live… but can’t be a ballerina!”

Having said all of that, Theron admits that the sheer relentlessness of the fight sequences really took it out of her. The bruises weren’t all make-up.

“I think my mom was a little worried about me when I was here making this film,” she says. “She was nice enough to come out and watch my kids, and she didn’t really see what was happening on the set that much, but I would come home and she’d see the aftermath of it. Like all mothers, she had a little moment of, ‘You’re a mom now. This isn’t worth it. Think about this.’ I was like, ‘Mom, it’s fine!’ (laughs)

“But to be any good at this job, you almost have to remove yourself from it. As soon as it becomes about you, I don’t think you should do the role. If I’m gonna say ‘yes’ and take the job, I know what’s expected, and I think it’s unfair to the film if you don’t deliver on that. So I couldn’t make this movie, and not go and learn to be a fighter the way that I’m a fighter in this movie. It would not have done this movie justice – it’s better for me to just not do it.”

The character of Lorraine Broughton is very much like a hard-bitten female combination of Jason Bourne and James Bond. Does Theron think it’s time for a female 007?

“Yes, I think we can do anything!” she laughs. “I mean, if it’s not known by now, my religion is that a woman can do anything! Sometimes when people are going, ‘Do you think we could have a female president in America?’, I’m going, ‘We are so late to this game, the rest of the world has already been there and back.’ So it’s basically just a thought process that needs to change in our world.”

Agent Broughton is also a lesbian, and Atomic Blonde features a steamy sex scene between Theron and her co-star Sofia Boutella.

“Actually, she’s bisexual,” she explains. “When you make this kind of movie, you’re always struggling to make it different. We’ve seen a million spy movies, and you can see what’s gonna happen. So the whole idea developing this was us constantly asking, ‘How can we make this more of a surprise?’ Or ‘How can we get something more out of it than just her hooking up with somebody?’

“And in eliminating all of the dialogue and back-story, what ended up happening was that you needed to see the struggle of her humanity, and the lack of being able to be intimate with somebody. That said everything about her, without her having to do a big monologue about where she comes from or what she’s experienced. I think in that world, it’s impossible for people to be intimate. You’re so shrouded in secrecy that the idea of being vulnerable with somebody else is almost impossible. So it wasn’t so much that it was a lesbian scene – I like that it was with a woman, because it felt authentic to me.

“It’s also something that’s not represented very well in cinema,” she continues. “If we’re gonna say that cinema’s a mirror held up to society, we’ve gotta be able to turn the mirror properly and see what the world is. And that’s a community that’s not heard very well. It would have been a different relationship if it was with a man. And it’s one of the few times you see Lorraine really vulnerable. I love that it’s not towards a man – I love that she’s not vulnerable one time in the movie towards a man. She’s vulnerable the only time to another woman.”

Theron was just 15-years-old when the Berlin Wall came down. How vividly does she remember that historic event?

“I remember it well,” she says. “Yeah, I mean it was a big conversation in South Africa at the time. I think it was a big conversation all over the world, because it was a very global thing that was happening. But it was talked a lot about in South Africa, because apartheid was very similar to what this wall represented. This idea that you can separate people, whether it’s through a wall or a sign that says ‘White People Only’. I think that resonated with South Africans. The idea that what was being eliminated in Berlin was also a real conversation that needed to be had in South Africa… that apartheid needed to be eliminated.”

Atomic Blonde also boasts a superb ’80s soundtrack featuring the likes of Nena, George Michael, New Order, Duran Duran, Falco and The Cure.

“I love the music in this movie,” enthuses Theron. “I had a bit of a princess moment about Depeche Mode. I might have pressured everybody to put Depeche Mode in this movie. It’s real nostalgia for me. And this whole era is very nostalgic for me, so yeah, it was definitely the one thing where I was like (whispers), ‘We need a Depeche Mode song!’” It’s no spoiler to say that Lorraine Broughton is still (just about) alive at the end of Atomic Blonde. So shall we be seeing her returning to the big screen again?

“Oh yeah!” nods Theron. “Look, we’re very actively talking right now about where we could go with her, and Universal is in full support of wanting to do that. They absolutely loved this movie, and we’ve been so lucky to have them as partners. So yeah, I would love to do it.”

Atomic Blonde is in Irish cinemas now