“It was totally gratuitous nudity”: the provocative scene that inspired Halle Berry to her finest hour
As reductive as it sounds, but since she implied it, it might well be true that Halle Berry may not have won an Academy Award had she not bared all in the terrible movie she shot immediately beforehand.
Obviously, her landmark win for ‘Best Actress’ wasn’t given to her for the sex scenes she shared with Billy Bob Thornton, which were so convincing that some people convinced themselves they were real, much to her chagrin, but the confidence she took from her last credit played a huge part in her performance.
Dominic Sena’s Swordfish is memorable for its opening scene, John Travolta’s daft soul patch, and Berry doing her first topless scene. That’s about it, with the techno thriller an otherwise turgid example of a movie being nowhere near as cool as it thinks it is, with critics and audiences equally nonplussed.
However, it isn’t true that Berry was paid half a million dollars to bare all, with the urban legend gaining a life of its own. She didn’t do it for an extra $500,000, she did it because she wanted to, as it was a part of herself that she’s never explored or exposed onscreen before, and it came in very handy not much further down the line.
Swordfish wrapped production in December 2000, and in May 2001, the actor started work on Monster’s Ball. She’d read the script, so she was aware that there were some steamy moments between her Leticia Musgrove and Thornton’s Hank Grotowski, but she was ready, all thanks to her first nude scene.
“In Swordfish, it was totally gratuitous nudity, and I knew it,” Berry explained. “But I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the sex scene in Monster’s Ball if I hadn’t shown my breasts in Swordfish. We shot the sex scene on day 19 of a 21-day shoot. The sex scene scared me completely, but courage comes in strange ways. I look at it now, and I think, ‘Who is that girl up there?'”
That scene is an integral part of the film, and for the characters played by Berry and Thornton, and while it wasn’t the deciding factor in making her greatest performance an Oscar-winning showcase, being more comfortable with nudity, having already experienced it on camera, allowed her to get deeper into both Leticia’s mindset and what the scene required.
There wasn’t much good to come from Swordfish, which isn’t a film anybody would be interested in watching more than once, although you suspect there was many an impressionable youngster who wore out their VHS freeze-framing Berry’s poolside appearance, but spurring somebody on to do the best work of their career is a solid legacy for an otherwise interminable picture to leave behind.
Would she have become the first and still only Black performer to win the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar had she not truly believed in those sex scenes? Most likely, because it’s a hell of a turn either way, but it definitely helped.
