Halle Berry laments falling victim to “Oscar curse”
After elevating her status in the modelling world and finishing as the first runner-up in the Miss USA beauty pageant in the late 1980s, Halle Berry broke into Hollywood with an appearance in the 1992 romantic comedy Boomerang. Throughout the remainder of the decade, Berry took on a selection of roles, reaching an early climax with 1999’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe.
By the turn of the century, Berry was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, and after winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ in 2002 for her role in Monster’s Ball, she appeared to be unstoppable. However, after a critically revered appearance as Bond girl Jinx in Pierce Brosnan’s final movie as Agent 007, Die Another Day, her career took an unexpected nosedive.
In a 2020 interview with Variety, Berry discussed her initial shock. She had hoped for the top flight filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg to come knocking and became frustrated when the big roles failed to materialise. “I think it’s largely because there was no place for someone like me,” Berry opined. “I thought, ‘Oh, all these great scripts are going to come my way; these great directors are going to be banging on my door.’ It didn’t happen. It actually got a little harder. They call it the Oscar curse. You’re expected to turn in award-worthy performances.”
In 2002, during her Academy Award acceptance speech, Berry proudly said that she had opened the entertainment industry up to “every nameless, faceless woman of colour.” Sadly, in the two decades that passed before her conversation with Variety, not a single leading Black woman had managed to follow suit.
“I thought Cynthia [Erivo, who starred in Harriet] was going to do it last year,” Berry said. “I thought Ruth [Negga, nominated for 2016’s Loving] had a really good shot at it too. I thought there were women that rightfully, arguably, could have, should have. I hoped they would have, but why it hasn’t gone that way, I don’t have the answer.”
“It’s one of my biggest heartbreaks,” she added in reference to her bitter-sweet Oscars experience. “The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?’ I wanted to believe it was so much bigger than me. It felt so much bigger than me, mainly because I knew others should have been there before me, and they weren’t.”
Now, Berry looks back on the award win as a personal and isolated victory that didn’t secure future success. “Just because I won an award doesn’t mean that, magically, the next day, there was a place for me,” she continued. “I was just continuing to forge a way out of no way.”
Later in the conversation, Berry discussed her post-Oscars decline. After her successful appearance in Die Another Day, the movie’s producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, lobbied for her character Jinx to get her own spinoff. Sadly, MGM turned down the $80million budget request. “It was very disappointing,” Berry commented. “It was ahead of its time. Nobody was ready to sink that kind of money into a Black female action star. They just weren’t sure of its value. That’s where we were then.”
Following this initial disappointment, Berry decided to take on the central role in Catwoman, the 2004 movie based on the DC Comics superhero. She knew it was a risky role to take on in her position but was keen to take on a challenge. “People said to me, ‘You can’t do that. You’ve just won the Oscar,’” Berry told Variety. “Because I didn’t do Jinx, I thought, ‘This is a great chance for a woman of colour to be a superhero. Why wouldn’t I try this?’”
Alas, as the project rolled on, she became aware Catwoman wouldn’t reap the rewards for which she had hoped. “The story didn’t feel quite right,” she said of the questionable narrative. “I remember having that argument: ‘Why can’t Catwoman save the world like Batman and Superman do? Why is she just saving women from a face cream that cracks their face off?’ But I was just the actor for hire. I wasn’t the director. I had very little say over that.”
As Berry had feared during production, Catwoman was a flop upon its release, underperforming at the box office and reaping critical jeers. In stark contrast with Berry’s Monster’s Ball success of two years prior, Catwoman received seven Razzie nominations, winning in the categories of ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Actress’ (for Berry), ‘Worst Director’ and ‘Worst Screenplay’.
Watch the trailer for Catwoman, the first down step in Halle Berry’s post-Oscar decline, below.
