Halle Berry: Up To The Challenge
Determined not to be a victim of the dreaded Oscar curse, Halle Berry has spent the last six years since her Best Actress win for Monster’s Ball doing a batch of movies that, in one way or another, showed off her range.

Whether playing a Bond girl in Die Another Day, whipping up the weather as Storm in the X-Men movies, or pouncing on the bad guys in Catwoman, Berry refused to be pigeonholed. The movies weren’t always hits but she insists she’s happy with all the choices she’s made.

"People have said to me, 'Halle, why haven’t you done another drama?’ Because I did Monster’s Ball and I won the Oscar. I might never win another one in my life, and that’s not really my goal, to try and stack up Oscars. I want to do roles that are fun and challenging and I want to try different things."

Berry’s latest stab at diversity is Perfect Stranger, the first psychological thriller on her resume. In the James Foley-directed flick, she plays Rowena, an investigative reporter who goes undercover to help solve a friend’s murder. The could-be culprit is a powerful ad exec named Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis). With the help of an associate (Giovanni Ribisi), Rowena poses as Katherine, a temp at Hill’s agency, as well as Veronica, a girl Hill flirts with online. But just when Rowena thinks she’s solved the murder, everything she knows about the whole sordid mess gets thrown out the window.

"This movie gave me the chance to do something that I had never done before, which was to play a character who is playing a character who is playing yet another character," says Berry. "That seemed like a real challenge to me. I wondered if I could carry the audience with me all the way to the end and provide them with a little bit of a surprise at the finish. Could I do that?"

Another challenge for Berry was to play a character who uses her sex appeal to bewitch members of the opposite sex. "James Foley wanted this movie to be sexy, sexy, sexy," says Berry with a laugh. "He said, ’There are no sex scenes or real nudity in this movie so let’s make it sexy. I want sexy.’ So we tried to bring in that element of grown-up sex appeal in other ways, though costumes and chemistry."

When Berry signed on for the movie, the role of her co-star — and prime target — had yet to be cast. A number of names were bandied about but Berry was in favor of casting Willis, her next-door neighbor.

"I knew that I had chemistry with Bruce just from our dealings as neighbors," she says. "He’d come out in his robe to the front of my house all of the time. The producers encouraged me to go over there and take him the script. I normally wouldn’t do that because I don’t want anyone bringing me a script, but they talked me into it. He read it, loved it and said he’d do it."

With two divorces (from Atlanta Braves star David Justice and singer Eric Benet) and countless broken relationships behind her, Berry admits she connected to the movie’s themes of loss and betrayal. Like many dark morality tales, Perfect Stranger hints at the impossibility of knowing anyone. It’s a premise that resonated strongly with the actress.

"Think about when you first meet someone and you go on a date," she says. "Don’t you send your representative? Everyone sends a representative for a while and then little by little, the onion is peeled back, and the real you comes out. Many times that’s when relationships fall apart because people say, ’Oh, my God. That’s who you are. I don’t like you at all.’ Then it’s over."

Since her acrimonious split from Benet, Berry has been dating model Gabriel Aubry, who is ten years her junior. She speaks about him warmly but contends she’ll never walk down the aisle again.

"I’ve been married twice, and been through hell," says Berry, 40, who recently revealed she contemplated suicide after the dissolution of her first marriage. "I no longer have the need to be someone’s wife and I no longer have the need to feel validated through marriage. I want kids. But, as I’ve grown and evolved, I know that I’m okay by myself." Contrary to a barrage of tabloid reports, Berry says she’s not pregnant, and has no immediate plans to start a family.

"Recently, every time I left a restaurant and had a good meal and had a little pooch, I was pregnant. That was a little annoying," she says. "When and if I ever get pregnant, trust me, I will have no reason to hide it. I’ll be the first one out there spreading the news about it."

Berry is ready to spread the news about her upcoming turn in Things We Lost in the Fire, her first emotionally-charged drama since Monster’s Ball.

In the film, due in October, she plays a woman who loses her husband (David Duchovny) to a random act of violence. When she feels like she won’t bounce back, his drug-addled best friend (Benicio Del Toro) arrives to help her pick up the pieces.

"It’s about how these two people come together and help each other deal with the loss of a person they both loved so much," says Berry. "I’m so proud of the movie."

Surprisingly, the actress couldn’t initially land a meeting with Fire director Susanna Bier, the Danish filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding.

"When I first read the script and heard that she was directing, I had to fight for it, which is fine," says Berry.

Even though the role wasn’t written for a black woman, Bier decided to cast Berry in the part and opted not to change the screenplay to reflect any racial issues. "They still made David Duchovny the husband, and just gave us two little interracial kids," says Berry. "That was the fix. It felt like a big win for me."
— Amy Longsdorf, Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images