The 2002 sex scene that almost killed Halle Berry: “I ended up choking on it”
Sex scenes can be many things, but dangerous isn’t supposed to be one of them. Clearly, Halle Berry didn’t get the memo, since her attempts at improvisation almost went spectacularly wrong.
Many actors have suffered from the Oscars curse over the years, and while you can definitely say that she was one of them after her history-making ‘Best Actress’ win culminated in her taking the stage at the Razzies three years later to call Catwoman a piece of shit, it’s not supposed to kill its victims.
It could have done, though, were it not for the co-star who sprang into action and saved Berry from potentially choking to death, all because her attempts at being sexy didn’t pan out, which would have been a terrible addendum to what was the most fruitful and successful period of her career.
Having played a major role in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, which helped save the superhero genre from the brink of irrelevance, she followed it up with Dominic Senna’s Swordfish, a movie a great deal fewer people would have given a shit about were it not for the publicity drummed up by the star’s first-ever topless scene, which she wasn’t paid an additional $500,000 to shoot, by the way.
After that, Berry was in Oscar-winning form in Monster’s Ball, and she was so good at her job that she felt the need to remind everyone that she wasn’t really shagging Billy Bob Thornton in the picture, because, for some reason, actors still have to point out that when they’re on set, it’s all make-believe and not genuine.
Next up was a mixed outing as a ‘Bond girl’ in Die Another Day, with Berry doing a solid job as Jinx in the landmark 20th adventure for 007, released in the franchise’s 40th anniversary year, which became the highest-grossing instalment in the series yet, which would have been a resounding set of positives were it not for the fact that the movie was quite shite.
Her character was supposed to get a spinoff, which was ultimately cancelled, but Berry wouldn’t have even made it that far had Pierce Brosnan not leapt to her aid when their bedroom antics almost tipped over from salacious cinema to a snuff film.
“I was doing a scene with Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day,” she recalled. “I am supposed to be trying to be all sexy and trying to seduce him with a fig, and then I ended up choking on it. And he had to get up and do the Heimlich. So not sexy, so not sexy.”
On the plus side, not everyone gets to be saved by James Bond for real, and as a result, Brosnan “will always be one of my favourite people in the whole world.” A word of warning to never introduce figs into the boudoir, then, because if it almost claimed Halle Berry’s life, you’ve got no chance at surviving.
