NEW RELEASES Halle Berry’s Hard-Hitting Directorial Debut By Ca ro l Bada r acco Padge t t Y ou are talented.” This is Halle Berry with Danny Boyd
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what most viewers would say to the 55-year-old acting icon, Halle Berry, who recently made her directorial debut with Netflix’s Bruised . She also starred in the film in the role of MMA fighter Jackie Justice. The mention of her talent is a compliment that Berry would take and run with too. In a Nov. 30, 2021, episode of the Smartless podcast, presented by Wondery and Amazon, hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett asked Berry what it’s like to be one of the world’s great beauties, with Bateman noting that he’d bet it can hurt sometimes in situations where she wants to be taken seriously. “At the end of the day,” Berry confirms, “something that’s really frustrating for me is that people always come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful.’ But I long for someone to come up to
me and say, ‘You’re talented,’ or ‘You’re a good mother,’ or ‘I saw you fought for that Senate Bill 606 to stop paparazzi from harassing kids, and that’s amazing.’” In Bruised , Berry’s talent, intellect, and heart as an actor and director are clearly on display. And these qualities definitely outshine her physical appearance as the raw, gritty ex-fighter, washed up and squirting booze into her mouth from a spray bottle under the kitchen sink as the story begins. “When I decided to do this film, I was really just going to be the actor,” she tells Bateman, Hayes, and Arnett. “I mean, training to play an MMA fighter was… hard enough for me to do,” Berry says of the process that led to her directing the film. The original screenplay for Bruised was written with the lead character being a 21-year-old white Irish Catholic girl. So when her agents at William Morris gave her the script, with Blake Lively originally attached to it, she was baffled. “I was like, ‘Thanks, guys. I love this, but it belongs to someone else,’” Berry notes. And yet, her agents convinced her to keep an open mind, sit with the script… and wait.
Eventually, Lively passed on the project. And in the six months that Berry waited,
Photos courtesy of Netflix
she’d begun reimagining the story centered around a character she could fully grasp and play—a middle-aged Black ex-fighter with a damaging history, living with her drunken ex-manager boyfriend. She envisioned the ex- fighter being a mother as well, who had once abandoned her young son. Berry then took her version of the story to the film’s producer, who was easily onboard with the vision, but who tasked her with finding the director. “I met with 12-13 people. And I met with established directors, first- time directors, but what I realized was that because the story wasn’t on the page yet, it was only in my head, the reimagining of it, that nobody got it like I got it. Nobody saw it like I saw it. And I had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment that if this is going to come to fruition the way I see it, and I’m going to work harder physically than I’ve ever worked on anything in my whole career, then I have to make sure it’s in the right hands.” In Berry’s reimagined world in Bruised , years after the ex-fighter experiences a humiliating defeat, her boy- friend (Adan Canto) takes her to a raw basement fight
where a massive woman wins and then challenges Justice, spitting liquor in her face. From that moment, the fire of the fighter is renewed and the intense training to win a title begins. During the journey, Justice meets her now six-year- old son, Manny, played by Danny Boyd, who has been relocated to the home of her troubled mother (Adriane Lenox). Over time, as she trains, the fighter experiences a parallel struggle in learning to develop a relationship with Manny and in navigating another with her manager and love interest, played by Sheila Atim. Although the ending of Bruised isn’t a traditional win for Justice, it’s a win nonetheless, as the fighter gets a last chance at motherhood and at life. For Berry, the actor and director, the ending of Bruised is also a win, of sorts. Because with this project under her belt, she will be described as not only beautiful and talented, but fierce, as well.
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