Halle Berry names her favourite co-star: “You just fall in love with who they are”
During a career that has been going strong for three and a half decades, Halle Berry has worked with a who’s who of Hollywood’s top talents. In truth, it’s harder to name a prominent thespian from the last half-century of cinema that she hasn’t worked with than it is to name the countless icons she has plied her trade alongside.
Indeed, casting an eye over the luminaries on Berry’s list reveals names like Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Judi Dench, Benicio Del Toro, Keanu Reeves, Julianne Moore, Daniel Craig, Hugh Jackman, Kurt Russell, and John Travolta. However, Berry didn’t name any of these greats as her favourite co-star of all time. Instead, that honour ironically belongs to someone she worked with on one of her worst movies.
After winning a historic ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for her harrowing performance in 2001’s Monster’s Ball, it’s fair to say Berry’s career became afflicted by the dreaded ‘Oscar curse.’ After that prison-centric romantic drama, her first two leading roles came in the abysmal comic book misfire Catwoman and the equally atrocious horror-thriller Gothika, neither of which exactly screamed of the kind of prestige projects most observers expected Berry to attach herself to.
However, sometimes a bad film can result from a good experience, and Berry met her favourite co-star in history on the set of Gothika. While playing a prison psychiatrist who finds herself incarcerated for supposedly murdering her husband, Berry starred alongside Penélope Cruz. The celebrated Spanish actor played an inmate whom Berry’s character had psychologically treated before she was imprisoned, and the two women’s on-screen chemistry is one of the few highlights of the film.
That chemistry must have translated off-screen, too, because when Berry was asked in 2024 to name her favourite co-star, she didn’t hesitate for a second. “Penélope Cruz,” she instantly responded with a warm smile. “I love her. I did a movie with her called Gothika. You know how you fall in love with someone, even if it’s a woman, you just fall in love with who they are as a person? I just loved her from the minute I met her. Yeah, she’s my number one.”
Perhaps one of the selling points of Gothika, and something Berry and Cruz may have bonded over, is that the movie didn’t trade on either woman’s looks. Both are famously beautiful Hollywood stars, but in Gothika, they are purposely stripped of the usual glamour the movie business insists on, and Berry admitted there was a certain thrill in that. “It’s really cathartic to not to have to worry about your looks,” Berry told Coming Soon, “especially in a time and an industry that it sometimes becomes all about that. It’s nice to say, ‘Hey, it’s really not all about that for us.'”
After marking Cruz as her absolute favourite, though, Berry did reserve some praise for another co-star: Billy Bob Thornton, with whom she worked on the “scary” Monster’s Ball. That movie required both stars to be more physically and emotionally open with each other than they’d ever been with another actor before, and she spoke extremely highly of his sensitivity. “He was gracious and kind and respectful,” Berry noted. “You know, it wasn’t easy to go to those places with someone you don’t know, but he was very respectful.”
