The role Halle Berry refused to play for less than $1 million: “You’re worth it”
Two of the easiest ways for an actor to increase their asking price are to win an Academy Award or play a leading role in a blockbuster franchise. Although Halle Berry accomplished both by the early 2000s, she had neither when she earned her first million-dollar payday.
A combination of her history-making ‘Best Actress’ win at the Oscars for Monster’s Ball and an ongoing role as Storm in the X-Men movies ensured that Berry became accustomed to taking home a hefty pay packet, but she’d already joined the seven-figure club long before then.
While it was always clear that she had huge potential, the first several years of her career were hardly laden with starring roles or box office hits. Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever opened a lot of people’s eyes within the industry to the fact that she was more than just a pretty face, and she played supporting parts in a number of popular and/or well-received genre films like Boomerang, The Last Boy Scout, and The Flintstones.
Perhaps driven by her decision to turn down Sandra Bullock’s star-making turn in Speed, a decision she didn’t regret, despite the film’s status as an all-time action classic, Berry quickly signed up for another pyrotechnic picture, but only after her demands had been met.
Taking second billing behind Kurt Russell’s protagonist as a flight attendant in Stuart Baird’s airborne thriller Executive Decision didn’t quite have the same effect on her career as Speed had on Bullock’s, but it nonetheless entered her into rarefied air when she was welcomed into the million-dollar club.
Reuniting with her Last Boy Scout producer, Joel Silver, who called her “the real thing” in a business where so many of her peers, according to him, “look pretty but they can’t act,” reports emerged that Berry had initially turned down the part until a suitable offer was made, which was instantly doubled her usual salary.
“He said, ‘You’re worth it; you should have been getting this along,'” she said, reflecting to The New York Times on how Silver went to bad with the studio to make sure Berry got her million. In an era where the biggest names regularly take home well over ten times that amount for a single movie, it seems relatively small change by comparison, but it was a transformative moment for the actor.
Now that she’s officially netted her first million-dollar paycheque, Berry was within her rights to ask for the same amount whenever she was approached for a new project. Less than a decade after Executive Decision, and following her aforementioned Oscar win and X-Men bankability, she scored no less than $14 million for squeezing herself into the title character’s ridiculous costume in Catwoman.
Sure, the film was awful, Berry won a Razzie for it, and she called it a “piece of shit” when accepting her prize, but it cemented her place as one of the industry’s highest-paid female performers, with her insistence on being paid that first million for Executive Decision the first domino to topple.
