Who wouldn’t want to finance Halle Berry?
“Everyone, it seems,” the actress said.
“There’ve been roles that I’ve really wanted to play and I’ve had to listen to producers say to me, ‘We don’t want to go black with the role because if we go black it changes the whole story because who would her parents be? Then we got to cast a black guy for the father. Then it becomes a black movie and then who’s going to see it?”
Berry was speaking at a special showing of her new film “Frankie and Alice” Monday night at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, part of TheWrap’s ongoing Academy Screening Series. TheWrap’s Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman led a post-movie Q&A with the actress. (All photographs by Jonathan Alcorn)
“Frankie” is the real-life account of Francine Murdoch, a victim of multiple-personality disorder. What sets it apart from your usual “Sybil” redux is that one of Murdoch’s personalities is a white racist named Alice.
“That’s probably one of the reasons I was drawn to this material, being of two different races,” confessed Berry, the child of a white psychiatric nurse mother and a black hospital worker.
“I had a real understanding of what that kind of hatred is and what that kind of racism is and what that does to a family,” said Berry. “T helped me relate to both Frankie and Alice because I grew up sort of in that world.”
“Some of the things that Alice had to say … I didn’t feel right in my body, either,” confessed Berry. “I just said, ‘God forgive me, forgive me. This isn’t who I am, forgive me!”
Does Halle Berry, Cleveland’s most famous daughter, identify as a white woman or a black woman or neither? “I realized early on that even though I was both, nobody really perceived me as both,” recalls Berry. “Because I was perceived as black and discriminated against that way -- that’s the group I identified with the most even though I grew up my whole life with my white mother.”
One time, she said, “I wanted to play a forest ranger and the producer said to me, “Nope, there are no black forest rangers,” recalled Halle Berry in front of a raucous crowd last night at Santa Monica’s Aero Theater. Berry replied, “Really? You’ve gone all around the world and you know there are no black forest rangers.”
“My niece is a black forest ranger,” interjected a member of the audience. “That’s so awesome,” shouted Berry as the crowd laughed and applauded.
When asked if, given her unique background, she could identify with President Obama, himself the son of an interracial couple, Berry professed to having a deep understanding of how he felt when he grew up, how he feels as a man and where he fits in the world.
“We can identify as a black people but still acknowledge the white side of who we are,” asserted the actor.
