“Fuck, that’s what I did?”: A box office bomb, a Razzie, and why Halle Berry has mixed feelings about making ‘Catwoman’
Halle Berry’s filmography has been undeniably uneven. She made an auspicious debut with a minor role in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever in 1991, but it took nearly a decade for her to land a part in a film of similar prestige. She joined the franchise scene with X-Men and the James Bond film Die Another Day, but it was the 2001 drama Monster’s Ball that marked the pinnacle of her career. Her portrayal of a grieving woman who forms an unlikely bond with the prison warden who executed her husband earned her the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’, making her the first woman of colour to receive the honour.
Despite this success, Berry’s movies throughout the early 2000s tended toward disaster, especially upon the release of the 2004 film Catwoman, an adaptation of the DC Comics character that was a critical and box office flop for the ages. Instead of launching her as a top-billed movie star, it tanked her career, at least for a few years.
To put it bluntly, Berry could have said, “Fuck, that’s what I did?” in relation to roughly 65% of her filmography. “You don’t expect it to be as bad as it is sometimes,” she said, referring to all the many flops she’s endured. “Then it comes out and you think, ‘Fuck, that’s what I did?'”
Of all the disastrous films she’s made, Berry has, not surprisingly, been the most outspoken and apologetic about Catwoman. At times, she’s taken it in stride, pointing to the things that she got out of it. “While it failed to most people,” she conceded, “[I]t wasn’t a failure for me because I met so many interesting people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, I learned two forms of martial arts, and I learned not what to do.” She also pointed to the “shit-load of money” she made from it, which is difficult to argue.
Another thing she got out of Catwoman was a Razzie Award for ‘Worst Actress’, which Berry collected while carrying the Oscar she’d earned two years before. “You don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people,” she said in her acceptance speech. “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, god awful movie.” She went on to bring her manager on stage, followed by her Catwoman co-star, Alex Borstein, to illustrate the point.
It seems that Berry is able to see the silver lining in most of the flops she’s done, including Dark Tide, a Jaws knockoff from 2012 that introduced her to her third husband. It was, she admitted, a “shit movie”, but it’s where she met and fell in love with Olivier Martinez, which must have counted for something.
It’s always refreshing when a movie star admits to making a poor film. It’s rare, but it does happen on occasion. And no matter how entertaining it is to hear Steven Spielberg trash Temple of Doom or how admirable it is to hear Jack Black call himself a sell-out for making Shallow Hal, it is tough to find an actor as game to own up to their cinematic missteps as Halle Berry.
