At age 48, Charlize Theron is embracing the way she looks—despite Hollywood’s unrealistic beauty standards and speculation about her appearance.

“My face is changing, and I love that my face is changing and aging…. People think I had a facelift,” the Oscar-winning actor told Allure in an interview published Friday. “They’re like, ‘What did she do to her face?’ I’m like, ‘Bitch, I’m just aging! It doesn’t mean I got bad plastic surgery. This is just what happens.’”

Speaking to the outlet in honor of her decades-long collaboration with Dior’s J’Adore perfume, Theron got candid about being a woman over 40 in Hollywood. “I’ve always had issues with the fact that men kind of age like fine wines and women like cut flowers,” she said. “I despise that concept and I want to fight against it, but I also think women want to age in a way that feels right to them. I think we need to be a little bit more empathetic to how we all go through our journey.”

Theron also delved into the physical toll of some past roles, which required her to gain weight or perform her own stunts. “I will never, ever do a movie again and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll gain 40 pounds.’ I will never do it again because you can’t take it off,” she said. At 27, Theron put on weight to play convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos for her Oscar-winning performance in 2003’s Monster. “I lost 30 pounds, like, overnight. I missed three meals and I was back to my normal weight,” she said. Theron tried to repeat that transformation at 43 for her role as a postpartum mother in 2018’s Tully, “and I remember a year into trying to lose the weight, I called my doctor and I said, ‘I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight.’ And he was like, ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was,’” Theron recalled. “Nobody wants to hear that.”

And while Theron has been known to do some of her own stunt work for roles in action films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, those days may be behind her. “The thing that really bums me out is that I make action movies now and if I hurt myself, I take way longer to heal than I did in my 20s,” she explained. “More than my face, I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow. Now, if I don’t work out for three days and I go back to the gym, I can’t walk. I can’t sit down on the toilet. It’s all those very real moments.”