“It’s secretly driven me mad”: the sex scene so convincing Halle Berry had to deny it was real
While it’s not untrue that many movies over the years have featured unsimulated sex scenes, it’s not the sort of thing that happens in mainstream Hollywood, which hasn’t stopped Halle Berry from being plagued by rumours that she’d joined the club.
She didn’t, she never has, and she never would, because she’s an actor. The better the actor, the more convincing they can make anything look, and as an actor who was at the top of their game in this particular instance, she made it look so convincing that many people simply refused to buy she was acting.
That’s a little bit weird, because it’s hardly a far-fetched notion that two trained performers can step in front of the cameras and present the illusion of sex without actually having to do the deed, although there are admittedly plenty of examples in cinema history that show certain directors felt otherwise.
As much as it’s a good thing for films to provide suspension of disbelief, immersion, and as close to authenticity as you can get without veering into full-blown porno territory, that doesn’t make it any less odd for a viewer to sit there, watch two people shagging and point at the screen, deciding, “They’re really fucking! They’re really fucking!”
And yet, when Berry and Billy Bob Thornton formed the beast with two backs in Monster’s Ball, an urban legend began. A fairly straightforward one, too: On the basis that their characters were so engrossed in the act that it looked like the real deal, it was decreed through whispers, scuttlebutt, and speculation that Marc Forster and his crew had simply watched the pair go at it, hammer and tongs, without a care in the world.
“We had this very explicit love scene,” Berry pointed out, which is true, and potentially underselling it, as anyone who’s seen the movie will know. “There’s an urban legend that we were really fucking. I’ve heard it, and it’s just not true. It’s secretly driven me mad all these years.”
This being the early 2000s, inevitably and despairingly, the tabloids were all over it, with the unfounded rumour that Berry and Thornton had gone the extra mile for their love scene conjuring stories out of thin air that they were romantically involved in real life, which wasn’t too ideal for him when he was married to Angelina Jolie at the time.
“You can’t just be a good actor,” Berry sighed. “And you can’t just make that shit look real. I’ll do a lot of things, but I’m not gonna sleep with your man.” That’s how certain minds tend to work, though: they see two people bumping uglies in a fictional feature to the degree they believe it’s real, and it takes an awful lot of convincing to change their mind, even if it’s quantifiably false.
Berry’s Academy Award-winning performance involved many things that saw her plumb the physical and emotional depths and mine everything she had to make Leticia Musgrove as real as possible, but one thing it absolutely, definitely did not involve was fucking Billy Bob Thornton for real.
