In Bruised, Halle Berry’s directorial debut now on Netflix, she plays an MMA fighter for the first time. But to hear the actor tell it, she’s spent her whole career in the ring—angling for the projects that materialize for others in Hollywood. “I’ve been fighting my whole life within this industry, as a Black woman fighting to make a way out of no way,” she tells Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy. “When I started 30 years ago, there were not nearly the opportunities that Black women get to enjoy and experience today. I was literally struggling to find work.”
Her 2002 Academy Award for Monster’s Ball, while groundbreaking, failed to translate into steady roles. “Even after my Oscar win, which is one of the greatest achievements of my life, I still struggled,” Berry explains. “I still had to figure out how to make a way for myself.” Nearly twenty years later, the first-time director reflects on the journey and its many hurdles for this week’s episode of Little Gold Men.
Elsewhere on LGM, Katey Rich and Richard Lawson dish on the Oscar prospects of West Side Story, break down Richard’s annual list of the top 10 movies of the year, and prognosticate what the Gotham Awards mean for the top races, before Katey’s interview with Gaby Hoffmann of C’mon C’mon. Meanwhile, David Canfield and Rebecca Ford drop by to share their thoughts on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming thriller, Nightmare Alley.
Give a listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. You can also sign up to text with us at Subtext—we’d love to hear from you.
Read a partial transcript of the Halle Berry interview below.
Vanity Fair: How long have you known that you wanted to direct?
Halle Berry: I got the idea that it was something I could do probably 10 years ago. I thought, This might be the second act of my career. It might be in my future. But I intended on directing a short first. I had written a short about plastic surgery, and I thought that would be my entry into my directing career.
Wow, that’s a very big leap from plastic surgery to mixed martial arts. What happened with that short and how did you land on Bruised?
Well, the short just never got done. It kept getting pushed and pushed and pushed. And I just kept working as an actor. You know, I’d written it and I was all set to go. But I never really dedicated the time to do it. I always was intending to, right? It was one of those things that was always gnawing at me. And when this came along, this was just given to me as a script to be an actor in the movie, never to direct it. I thought I just wanted to play the MMA fighter. That was largely enough for me. It was a big, huge role. I’d have to spend a couple years training and getting my body into shape and learning all these different martial art disciplines. So I didn’t even really expect to be on this journey directing this film, honestly.
So how did you go from starring in the movie to directing it?
When I got the script, it was written for a 20-something, white, Irish Catholic girl. Blake Lively had the script at the time. My agent says, “If Blake does it, then obviously you can’t. But if she passes on her own volition, I’ll make sure you get a shot at it.” I knew that would require me reimagining the role for a middle-aged Black woman, and a whole different world because the world that’s on paper is not the world I can exist in. It took her about six months to decide. While she was doing that, I was actively and passionately reimagining the character for a Black woman like me, and in a world that I understood. So when she passed, I had the opportunity to go to Basil [Iwanyk]—he was a producer at the time—and pitched my version of it. And to my surprise, he said, “Yes. Now, Halle, go find a filmmaker.” I said, “Will do. I’m gonna go find a filmmaker. I’ll be back.”
It’s not that I couldn’t find one. There were wonderful filmmakers. But the problem is the reimagining was only in my head at that point, it wasn’t to paper yet. You only get to reimagine someone’s script when you become the director, and I hadn’t been given that job yet. So all I had in my mind, when I sat down with these filmmakers, was [to] pitch my story how I saw it. And I realized that none of them really saw it like I saw it in my head. They loved the drama part of it, but thought, Does it have to be a fight movie? And they were all women. I needed a female director, that was a caveat. Or they would say, “I love the fight part. But why do we need all that drama?” And I needed both—the story and the fight.
A very good friend of mine said, “I think you should do this because you speak about it with so much passion. You understand it like no one seems to understand it. You love it like nobody seems to love it.” And I was like, “Are you high? Are you smoking something? Because there is no way.” She said, “Don’t let fear get in the way.” Then a couple of days went by and I thought, Yeah, I’m not gonna let fear get in the way.
I have to imagine this is sort of a mammoth task. You have to train for this incredibly physically demanding role, and you also have to act in it and you’re also directing. How did you juggle training as an athlete, actor, and director?
I started training probably two and a half years before I actually started filming. Pretty much every day [I was] training, except Sunday, six hours a day. Learning MMA, you have to learn all the disciplines. I was learning judo, aikido, tae kwon do, muay Thai, boxing, kickboxing, wrestling—all these aspects in order to put this fight together. I was also doing John Wick at the time that I was preparing for this movie. So I’d be on the set in Morocco filming John Wick, and then I’d be up all night with [screenwriter] Michelle [Rosenfarb] talking about Bruised. Then when I got to preproduction, I was still in my fight training every day. It just made for a super-long day. I would start at five in the morning and be done at midnight. And I just did that again and again and again.
You got injured on the set of John Wick and again at the very beginning of Bruised. Did that derail anything? Are you okay right now?
I am okay, thank God. And you’re right, I did. I got injured in the training process of John Wick. I broke three ribs. And that movie is such that it could absorb a shutdown—it’s a big movie. It’s got a lot of money behind it. When it came to Bruised, I broke two ribs, but I knew that if I told anybody, they would shut me down, I would lose my financing, which was teetering most days anyway. Because I had been training for almost two, three years, I had developed the fighter’s mentality, so quitting just wasn’t an option. It was like, Okay, I’m hurt. I can’t tell anybody or we’ll be shut down, my dream will die very hard. We just have to keep going.
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