Halle Berry: How she’s upending traditional Hollywood attitudes about age, race and gender

Bruised, the new MMA fight movie that Netflix paid a reported $19m to buy following its Toronto festival premiere last week, was originally written about a white, Irish-American Catholic fighter in her early twenties. The fighter has hit hard times and is struggling to hold on to her child.

Somehow, Michelle Rosenfarb’s script caught the attention of the 54-year-old Oscar-winning actor, Berry.

“I knew that, as written, it could not be me, but what I loved about the story was that it was a classic fight film. Throughout history, people love to root for the underdog; they love a good fight film. I loved the fractured and brokenness of this character and I love to see a film that’s about redemption. I want to see the human spirit soar,” Berry explained during her “In Conversation With” Toronto masterclass a few days ago.

Bruised promises to be as groundbreaking as Monster’s Ball (2001), the death row drama for which Berry received her Oscar. She was the first, and remains the only, African American to have won the Best Actress award. Now, by directing and starring in her own MMA film in a role originally intended for a much younger white actor, the Bond movie and X-Men star is upending traditional Hollywood attitudes about age, race, and gender.

For years, everyone has accepted actors like Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, and Clint Eastwood starring in action dramas when they’re in their fifties or older, often in stories that allow them romances with far younger women. Female stars, especially African Americans, are rarely granted such license. The 1970s blaxploitation star Pam Grier may have been in her late forties when she appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) but she was playing a flight attendant, not a fighter. She wasn’t directing either. Berry, by contrast, had taken a project intended for somebody else and remoulded it to suit her.

In advance of the release of Bruised, which screened as a work in progress in Toronto, the same cleverly placed stories about Berry that invariably accompany action movies with male stars have popped up in the press and on social media. We’ve learnt Berry performed her own stunts, just as she did last year for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019). We’ve heard about her stint at MMA boot camp. The UFC’s official website had reports that she “underwent rigorous training for the role, and she’s been a UFC regular ever since”. Living up to the title of her film, she cracked her ribs during one of the fight scenes but carried on shooting regardless.

The subtext of all the hype is obvious. Berry isn’t just some pampered Hollywood star flirting with a famously brutal sport. She’s “all in”, ready to train as intensely, and suffer as much, as the most hardened professionals. In symbolic fashion, she is facing down all those critics who mocked her so relentlessly when she was starring in her slinky, fetishistic black leathers and mask, whip-cracking away, in Catwoman (2004). “Doing her utmost to persuade the Academy to take back her Oscar” and “only worth seeing if you can handle shallow characters and dull, plastic action scenes” were among the kinder responses to a movie that won Berry the Golden Raspberry award for the worst performance of the year.

Showing defiance and considerable humour, Berry accepted her Catwoman “Razzie” in person. Her speech was brilliant: a raucous, tearful parody of the typical Oscar monologue. “I’ve got so many people to thank because you don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people,” she said and then proceeded to excoriate everybody from Warner Bros to her manager, from her acting coach to her fellow stars. “In order to give a really bad performance, you need a lot of bad actors around you.” The same audience that had voted her the “worst” were applauding her wildly by the end.

Look back over Berry’s career and you’ll find a strange mixture of hard-hitting dramas and kitsch, mainstream films and TV soap operas in which she has thankless roles. She is a former beauty queen, the first African American to represent the USA in the Miss World competition. At first, she wasn’t allowed to forget her beauty pageant past. She was often cast more on the basis of her looks than her ability. In ABC sitcom Living Dolls (1989), she played Emily Franklin, one of a group of teenage models working for a small agency in New York. “I didn’t have a real character or part to play. I knew early that to be taken seriously as an actor, I would have to shed this physical self,” Berry said recently of her time in the saccharine sitcom that received terrible reviews and was cancelled after a single season.

In her Toronto Festival Q&A last week, Berry referred several times to her struggles to be taken seriously by casting directors fixated on her looks. She described herself variously as “more than the shell I walk around in”, “more than just a pretty face”, and “more than a model turned actress”.

Playing a crack addict opposite Samuel L Jackson in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) gave her a first real chance to escape Living Dolls-style typecasting. Instead of playing a beauty queen or model, she was cast as Vivian, “the two-dollar crack ho.” An initially sceptical Lee insisted on multiple auditions before he finally gave her the role. “I think she didn’t bathe for a week and I didn’t recognise her when she stepped in the room. And that’s how she got the part,” he later recalled.

In a dirty old bandana, wearing no make-up, sniffing constantly, and swigging from a bottle, Berry’s Vivian is a figure of pity until she starts talking. Whenever she opens her mouth, she lets rip with a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse. At times, her sheer malevolent fury seems to take even her co-star Jackson by surprise.

Not that Jungle Fever allowed Berry to re-invent herself as a method actor. She was beginning her movie career during a golden period for US independent cinema in the 1990s but was still far more likely to be seen in romcoms and family films than in the type of hard-hitting, award-contending indie dramas that surfaced at the Sundance festival. She co-starred with Warren Beatty in political satire Bulworth (1998), playing a rapper and activist who has an affair with the much older white senator played by Beatty. Nonetheless, as the headline to a 2016 interview she gave to W Magazine put it, Berry “had to beg Hollywood to take her seriously”.

“It was intentional to not play the gorgeous girl,” Berry told W. She spoke of taking roles that “really didn’t rely on my physical self”.

Regardless of her film choices, though, Berry would continually appear at the top of lists like People Magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People”.

In her Toronto Q&A, Berry spoke of the way reviewers dismissed her work in films by black directors.

“I remember having the feeling when we shot Boomerang that we were slightly before our time.  I don’t think at that time the industry was really ready for a movie like that and to see black people in that way,” she said of her 1992 comedy about gender, sex, and workplace culture, directed by Reginald Hudlin and in which her co-star Eddie Murphy plays a philandering executive who tries to sleep his way to the top. She dismissed the criticism that the film was unrealistic. “Unrealistic to who? If you’re black and you know your culture, you know it’s true but society hadn’t caught up with that truth yet.” As if to make up for the film’s lukewarm reception, she recently produced a TV series spin-off.

Berry was similarly scathing about the critical response to her 1997 feel-good comedy, BAPS (the acronym for Black American Princesses) in which she played a gaudily dressed, blonde-wigged, gold-toothed waitress from Georgia who heads to LA in search of fame and fortune and ends up being bankrolled by a rich, white sugar daddy (Martin Landau). “These kind of movies… people who were reviewing them didn’t understand the culture well enough to understand how relevant these movies were.”

In Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball, Berry again played a waitress but there is nothing remotely comic about this southern Gothic melodrama. Her husband (Sean Combs) is on death row. Struggling to pay the rent and bring up her kid, she becomes involved with Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), a customer at the diner where she works, without realising he was the prison warder who oversaw her husband’s execution.

After Berry’s Oscar triumph, there was a backlash against her. The film was accused of stereotyping black women. Its plot focused on “the questionable premise of an impoverished young black woman rescued by older white man”, as one newspaper put it. The explicit sex scene was criticised.

“I am always most drawn to characters that are fractured and broken, who are fighting to survive – the underdog or the misunderstood character,” Berry said in her Toronto Q&A last week. However, after Monster’s Ball, she made some questionable career moves. She had already played Storm in X-Men (2000) when she took the role as special agent Jinx Johnson in 007 movie Die Another Day (2002). As the Oscar-winning star of successful superhero and Bond movies, she was in the position to do exactly what she wanted. However, half-baked psychological horror movie Gothika (2003) and Catwoman (2004) were ill-advised choices.

There might have been covert racism in MGM’s decision not to support Bond producer Barbara Broccoli’s plans to make a spin-off action movie based around Jinx. The studio, Berry recently told trade paper Variety,  simply didn’t have the confidence to “sink that kind of money into a black female action star”.

Now, the landscape has shifted. Whereas MGM passed on the Jinx spin-off, Netflix is backing Bruised. “20 years ago, we were in a much different place than we are today for sure. I struggled to find roles that inspired me, that allowed me to showcase my talent … but today, I do see that things have changed. Look at television. Our best movies now I think are on TV and it is full of colour,” said Berry. She has better choices today than when she had just won her Oscar. She has the chance to make films entirely on her own terms: to produce and direct them as well as star in them and no-one is reminding her of her beauty pageant past or asking her to wear leathers and a mask.

Halle Berry’s directorial debut ‘Bruised’ premiered as a work in progress at the Toronto International Film Festival. The date of its release by Netflix is yet to be confirmed