At a place like the South By Southwest Film Festival, in Austin, Texas, movies are one thing; movie stars are quite another. And so Austin’s Paramount Theater bubbled over with energy when Charlize Theron took to the stage to introduce Atomic Blonde alongside director David Leitch and co-star James McAvoy.

In the film, adapted from a graphic novel – The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart – Theron plays a British secret agent being sent to Berlin just ahead of the fall of the Berlin Wall to retrieve a sensitive list of clandestine contacts.