The movie Halle Berry was tricked into making: “Once she signs on, we’ll throw it in the bin”
In 2004, Matthew Vaughn switched from producing the Guy Ritchie cockney geezer classics Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch to directing his own London gangster picture, Layer Cake.
The feature made a star of Daniel Craig and put Vaughn on the radar of major Hollywood studios, and within two years, Craig would be immortalised as James Bond in Casino Royale, and Vaughn would land a plum role directing the third entry in a beloved blockbuster series starring Halle Berry.
Unfortunately for Vaughn, though, replacing the departing Bryan Singer on X-Men: The Last Stand proved to be something of a poisoned chalice. Singer had left the Marvel series he defined when he got the chance to switch sides and direct Superman Returns for DC and Warner Bros, and Vaughn was drafted into an ever-evolving project with tons of moving parts and an enormous ensemble cast.
To put it into perspective, The Last Stand would feature the return of the core X-Men team and the villainous Magneto, which entailed Berry, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, and Rebecca Romijn all reprising their roles from X-Men and X2. In addition, new characters played by Kelsey Grammar, Ben Foster, Vinnie Jones and Elliot Page had to be worked into the mix, within a sub-two hour runtime.
This was always going to be a tall order for Vaughn, but matters were complicated even further when Berry demanded a more critical role in the third film. She wasn’t happy with how her character, the weather-manipulating mutant Storm, was used in the first two movies, and even threatened to quit the production if she wasn’t given more of a fair shake this time. While she later maintained she was bluffing, and didn’t actually want to leave the role, she did want to “scare the shit” out of Fox to “get some attention”.
Berry’s beef stemmed from the flak she received from passionate comic book fans about Storm’s perceived lack of importance in the movies. “They would, like, attack me,” Berry told Movie Web. “I would say, ‘This is the feedback I’m getting. I think Storm does a little bit more in the comic book, and the fans aren’t happy.”
Interestingly, Berry was adamant that she wasn’t necessarily demanding Storm receive more screentime, because she was aware the X-Men movies were ensembles where everyone should get a chance to shine. Instead, even if her screentime remained relatively short, she argued, “If I’m gonna be on for ten minutes, can I say something important for ten minutes instead of ‘Where’s the plane?'”
At the core of the matter, Berry wanted Storm to be given a valid point of view and a more fully fleshed-out personality in the third film, as there was very little to set Storm apart from some of the other B-tier mutants in the first two movies. “When she spoke before, it was a little ambiguous and vague,” Berry noted. “She never really had anything insightful to say about who she was. This time, she doesn’t say a lot, but you understand who she is and where she is coming from.”
As that quote suggests, Berry got her wish, and Storm’s role was bulked up in the sequel, putting her on a more level playing field with Jackman’s Wolverine. In turn, this meant she had more important things to say and do, and it revealed much more depth to her personality than the movies had previously suggested. However, Vaughn wasn’t involved in this at all because he quit X-Men: The Last Stand when he found out Fox was planning to pull a bait and switch on Berry.
After being hired as the director, Vaughn recalled meeting with a Fox executive who had a fat script sitting on his desk. When Vaughn asked what it was, the exec tried to palm him off by saying, “Don’t worry about it”. Undeterred, Vaughn picked the screenplay up and began reading an opening scene featuring Berry’s Storm in the comic character’s native Africa, where she is summoning a thunderstorm to rescue some starving children. This scene, naturally, is not in the final cut of X-Men: The Last Stand, nor was it ever shot.
“That’s a pretty cool idea,” Vaughn remembered telling the executive. However, when the exec dismissively referred to it as “the Halle Berry script,” the director got a sinking feeling. He claimed the exec told him, “She hasn’t signed on yet, but this is what she wants it to be. So, once she signs on, we’ll throw it in the bin.”
Yes, if Vaughn is to be believed, Fox effectively tricked Berry into agreeing to make X-Men: The Last Stand with script pages it never intended to film, all purporting to give Storm even more of a focus than she received in the final cut directed by Brett Ratner. Vaughn was horrified by this underhanded tactic, as he figured if the studio was willing to do that to an Oscar winner, what hope did he have of actually being able to direct the movie his way.
“So, I quit at that point,” he admitted. “I figured I was mincemeat.”
Amazingly, after Vaughn aired this dirty laundry at New York Comic Con in 2023, Berry replied to him on Instagram, indicating she never knew anything about Fox’s little plot. “Ya just never know the shady shit going on behind ya back,” she wrote. “Thank you, Matthew Vaughn, for bringing the dark to light.”
