Auditioning in front of your idol is always going to be crazy. For Charlize Theron, it was a whole other level.

“It was not good!” she told Stephen Colbert of her audition for That Thing You Do, written and directed by Hanks. “I don’t know why he gave me the role, I mean, honestly. I was so nervous. Imagine you’re 19 and you meet this idol. I idolized him! I watched Turner and Hooch like 500 times. So to audition for somebody like that, it’s frightening.”

“The character who plays my boyfriend in the movie, his character name was Guy,” she said of the lead role played by Tom Everett Scott. “I had to do this scene, and Tom [Hanks] read with me. It’s so mortifying. I got so nervous that I couldn’t say Guy and I kept saying ‘gay’ and the more I tried to correct myself, the more I just said ‘gay.’ It was just so horrible. He literally said at one point, ‘You know, let’s just take a break. We’ll come back.’ And I was like, ‘Ugh, I am sucking right now!’”