The cringeworthy scene Halle Berry was blamed for: “She did it like she was King Lear”
It feels like the stars of early 2000s comic book movies are finally getting their flowers, which has seen Chris Evans reprise his role as The Human Torch, Tobey Maguire slip back into the Spidey suit, and even Jennifer Garner return as Elektra.
If she can find a way to forgive the character that nearly killed her career, then anything is possible, and with the X-Men license now back under Marvel’s control, that means we might see a comeback for one of that series’ biggest stars: Halle Berry.
The Oscar-winning icon played Ororo ‘Storm’ Munroe in all three of Fox’s first attempts to make big-screen stars out of Marvel’s magnificent mutants, and though she was never the main character, she played a pivotal role in much of the action, wielding her weather powers against the forces of evil and sporting not one, but two different hairstyles.
She briefly reprised the part in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but hasn’t been seen since, perhaps because she remembers how the studio tried to trick her into making X-Men: The Last Stand? Or maybe she’s still haunted by one of the strangest line deliveries in blockbuster movie history, towards the end of the first X-Men movie, when Storm comes face to face with Ray Park’s Toad, one of Magneto’s henchmen.
After setting him up for a killing blow, Berry asks, “What happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning?” You might be expecting the answer to this question to be a pun or some sort of clever wordplay, maybe ‘it croaks’, or something like that, but instead, Berry delivers the immortal line, “The same thing that happens to everything else”.
The man responsible for this baffling dialogue is actually Joss Whedon, the future disgraced director of The Avengers, who was brought in to punch up most of the film’s final act, which included this scene. As per an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Whedon thinks this infamous moment could have worked had the line been delivered slightly differently. “It was supposed to be like a throwaway, and she did it like she was King Lear,” he claimed, “I was trying to explain what I had written versus the actor who played it. But all people remember is you’re the one who wrote that terrible line. I should have never told that story.”
As reluctant as I am to agree with Whedon, he does make an interesting point. Berry’s delivery is deadly serious, way more so than any of her other lines, wherein her unwavering dedication to the dialogue, combined with the absurdity of the situation of Toad hanging onto a railing with his elongated tongue, only serves to make the scene even weirder.
I’m sure Whedon was going for a subversive ‘anti-quip’ designed to poke fun at traditional superhero zingers, but it doesn’t look like that when it’s written down. If anything, director Bryan Singer should have been more clued in to the intention of the line, for Berry could only work with what she was given.
Personally, I’m quite happy the line exists, offering something to look forward to when you’re watching the movie, and at least it’s memorable such that one wonders whether the alternative would have us still be talking about it over 25 years later.
