The nude scene Halle Berry wasn’t paid $500,000 to shoot: “I would sell these babies for way more money”
Everyone has their own opinion on the validity and necessity of nude scenes, but at the end of the day, it’s at the actor’s discretion. Halle Berry isn’t against them, but she still needed to clear the air.
Modern audiences appear to be less interested in sex, nudity, and graphic sexual content than generations past, and the introduction of intimacy coordinators has been hugely beneficial to the performers, regardless of how many of the old guard give it the old, ‘It wasn’t like that in my day’.
If an actor doesn’t want to bare all for the cameras or partake in a scene that oversteps a boundary they’re unwilling to cross, then they won’t do it. It should be as simple as that, which is one of the reasons why Berry felt the need to clarify that she wasn’t essentially bribed with $500,000 to go topless.
Shot immediately before her Academy Award-winning performance in Monster’s Ball, Dominic Senna’s Swordfish almost immediately reunited the actor with her X-Men co-star Hugh Jackman in a nonsensical techno thriller that goes completely off the rails after an opening scene that kicks things off with a bang.
It was reported that Berry pocketed a cool $2.5 million for her role as the undercover DEA agent, Ginger Knowles, sent in to dismantle the operation run by John Travolta’s Gabriel Shear and his stupid-looking goatee, but speculation that half a million had been added to her paycheque solely to convince her to perform the first nude scene of her career turned out to be wide of the mark.
“Totally not true,” Berry replied when quizzed on the rumours by Cinema. “I would sell these babies for way more money! I don’t know where it came from. Nobody is owning up to it, but it has made great publicity for the movie.” Instead, she explained exactly why she’d agreed to the poolside scene in question.
“I did the scene because it showed you that the character was in control of her sexuality and very comfortable with herself,” she said. “The challenge for me was to pull it off and not just sit there naked and looking scared to death, like I initially felt. I’ve never really explored that part of myself onscreen before. For so many years, I said, ‘No, no, no.'”
It wasn’t the promise of an additional $500,000 that changed her mind, but rather after spending those prior years “not being comfortable with myself, being afraid, and wondering what people would think,” her rapid rise up the Hollywood ranks allowed her to “sort of shed myself of all those worries, and I feel really, really good about myself.”
As Berry alluded to, the untrue scuttlebutt that it had taken a fair chunk of change to convince her to do it made plenty of headlines, but the truth was much simpler: she’d reached a point in her professional life where she felt comfortable enough in her own skin to try something she’d never been confident enough to try before.
