Halle Berry’s nostalgic soft spot for one of her worst movies: “I wanna go back”
Halle Berry has had one hell of a career, making history at the Oscars, playing iconic superheroes, and even starring in a Flintstones movie.
Once written off as merely a sex symbol, Berry proved that there was much more to her than meets the eye, standing as a versatile performer onscreen and a force for good off it, living her life to the full, but acting wasn’t always on the cards for the former Bond girl.
Berry began her career as a model, finishing runner-up in the 1986 Miss USA pageant, and it wasn’t until the success of the 1992 comedy Boomerang that she believed she could truly make it as a performer. She’s come a long way since those days and worked very hard to get to where she is now; however, it wasn’t all bad.
Speaking to Eurweb, Berry revealed a desire to return to the early, carefree days of her career, and to one project in particular that she felt encapsulated her love of this era, one that nobody expected her to be nostalgic for.
“If I could go back, I wanna go back to my BAP [sic] days,” she said, referring to the 1997 movie BAPS. “I wanna go back and have that kind of freedom, to be that silly on film and be that brave, ‘cause that was a time in my career when I didn’t care what anybody thought. That was a free time, and I hope I can find my way back to that at some point.”
Released in 1997, BAPS (which stands for Black American Princesses) is a buddy comedy from director Robert Townsend, not of The Warriors fame. but the one who worked with Eddie Murphy early in his career.
It stars Berry and Natalie Desselle as two aspirational young women who become involved in a plot to swindle an old, rich man, Martin Landau, out of his money. The film was absolutely torched by critics upon its release, with Roger Ebert despising it, giving it a rare rating of zero stars, while his reviewing partner Gene Siskel shared this sentiment in an equally rare moment of co-operation from the on-screen rivals.
Ultimately, BAPS wasn’t made for people like Siskel and Ebert and was very much aimed at an African-American audience, featuring cameos from prominent Black celebrities at the time, including LL Cool J and Dennis Rodman. This strategy of appealing to a certain demographic paid off, which led to Berry being nominated for a ‘Best Actress’ prize for her performance at the 1998 American Black Film Festival, and the movie has since become a cult favourite among Black Americans, considered in some circles to have been years ahead of its time.
As soon as you become as big a star as Berry, your career begins to become about everyone else except you, so something like BAPS represents a stage in her life where she could have fun and make movies she wanted to make, even if everybody else hated it at the time.
