The history-making movie Halle Berry never gets asked about: “Nobody. No. Body. Nobody!”
In any actor’s career, there will be movies they love and feel they did their best work in, and there will be movies that audiences love the most. Sometimes, these two things align, and a star is as fond of one of their own movies as much as the fans they interact with. On some occasions, though, the movie a star received the most acclaim for is a film nobody ever wants to discuss. Instead, they get asked about things they’d never imagine would have made such a lasting impact. Halle Berry once admitted she knows this odd feeling all too well, which surprises her every time.
In 2010, Berry sat down with Vogue magazine for an interview to promote the low-budget drama Frankie & Alice. It was the star’s return to the screen after she took time off following the double hit of Perfect Stranger and Things We Lost in the Fire in 2007. During that time away from the silver screen, she had a baby and split up with her partner. She also resolved to stop talking so much about her private life in interviews because she felt the public—and Hollywood—was getting a false impression of her.
Indeed, Berry believed she was seen as a “brooding, twisted, lovesick person who just can’t get it right in life. Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That’s not how I do life. But that’s the impression people have, and that’s what keeps getting reiterated.”
Interestingly, Berry was convinced this perception of her personal life had affected her professionally, too. In fact, she wondered if winning a historic ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award for 2001’s racism drama Monster’s Ball had played into the idea of her as a serious woman who only wanted to play serious roles. She even pondered if the notorious ‘Oscar curse’ had been plaguing her.
“People win Oscars, and then it seems like they fall off the planet,” Berry mused. “And that’s partly because a huge expectation walks in the room and sits right down on top of your head. The moment I won the Oscar, I felt the teardown the very next day. I thought, ‘If I’m going down, I’m going down taking chances and daring to risk.'”
So, in an effort to dispel the notion that she was only attracted to worthy, important projects about serious topics, she went as far in the other direction as she could. “I had such high hopes for that movie,” Berry sighed, speaking of her abysmal 2004 superhero dud Catwoman. “It seemed like a good idea. Men have done it. But our story just wasn’t good enough.”
Indeed, none of Berry’s popcorn efforts released in the wake of Monster’s Ball – Die Another Day, Gothika, X-Men: The Last Stand – were well-received, and she was soon making harrowing bereavement and addiction dramas like Things We Lost in the Fire again.
The thing that consistently surprised and strangely comforted Berry, though, was that none of her fans ever wanted to talk about these dramas. Instead, anyone she met at an event or on the street invariably told her how much they loved her movies in the vein of Catwoman. “I will tell you one thing that has helped me deal with the failure of that,” she chuckled. “Critics bashed it, but people come up to me now and either they say, ‘I loved you in the movie BAPS, which is a comedy that I did, or they say, ‘I don’t care what anybody says, I liked Catwoman.'”
Amusingly, Berry then proved without a shadow of a doubt that, more often than not, audiences want to be entertained more than they want to cry. She smiled, “Nobody ever says, ‘I really loved Monster’s Ball.’ Nobody. No. Body. Nobody!”
