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Features
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A Determined Diabetic
B.B. King, Patti Labelle, Jackie Robinson, Nell Carter, Arthur Ashe… Mindful of the long list of celebrity diabetics, actress Halle Berry is constantly searching out the latest news about the disease.
Monday, April 16, 2007 at 3:25 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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WireImage.com
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Looking splendifirous at the April 10th New York premiere
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The next time you’re in an diabetes sufferers chat room on the Internet and notice someone signed in as Halle Berry, don’t laugh. Chances are, it could very well be the 40-year-old star of this weekend’s new thriller Perfect Stranger.
“I'm diabetic, so I go on to diabetic chat rooms and learn about the disease and the science and things I need to know that help me,” Berry explains during a recent interview with FilmStew. “I go as myself. People don't believe it half the time, but I'm trying to get the news. A lot of times they don't and I just buzz right past it, because I'm really on there usually trying to see if something I heard was true or read up on an article that some doctor wrote.”
Then there’s Hallewood.com, the actress’ official online destination, where just under 4,000 members are registered to participate in the “Groover Chatroom.” Berry says the visitors are generally looking for inspiration, along with perhaps updates on the Oscar winner’s latest projects. Such as Composition of Black and White, the Alicia Keys project Berry is producing, based on the Kathryn Taladay biography of interracial pioneer Philippa Schyuler.
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Djamilla Rose Cochran/WireImage.com
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Imminent collaborator Alicia Keys
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“That's still out there,” Berry reveals. “We're trying to get a script that we all like and we're getting closer and closer every day, but you know, these things take time. It’s often challenging. And a character like Philippa, her life was so long and so involved. It's a bio, so you have to figure out what parts of her life are important and what parts can we sort of gloss over and it takes time to get that balance right.”
Post Perfect Stranger, there is also Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s recently completed Things We Lost in the Fire, with Benicio del Toro, and the prospective Carl Franklin comedy drama Class Act. But in the latter case, Berry says her co-star is actually still up in the air. “Billy Bob [Thornton] might not actually be in it, that's a little bit of misreporting. We don't even know if we're going to start that right away. We're still working on getting that together, and Billy Bob might have a scheduling conflict.”
Doug Atchinson (Akeelah and the Bee) is set to direct Fire, and as has ironically been the case ever since Berry made African-American Oscar history, her character is essentially race-agnostic. She will play Reno, Nevada sixth grade school teacher Tierney Cahill, who ran for Congress in 2000 with the administrative campaign support of her students.
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Warner Bros.
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Never again
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“I'm excited because she's not a woman of color,” Berry exclaims. “She's just this teacher who ran for public office. That's a step in the right direction for me because I've been fighting to just be seen as a woman and not always have my color precede me. So when [Perfect Stranger producer] Elaine [Goldsmith-Thomas] said, ‘Wouldn't this be a great role for you?’ I said, ‘You should ask her. Maybe she doesn't want her story portrayed by a black woman.’"
“But she loved the idea, and that said to me that things are changing,” she continues. “Tierney said, ‘I just want somebody who embodies the spirit of me, I don't care what color they are.’ Things are changing, and that's good.”
But of course, most of the publicity these days for Berry surrounds the romantic comedy Nappily Ever After, and the fact that the actress has announced that she will shave her head bald for the project. She says it is a part that fills her with fear. In a good, actorly way.
“I'm scared to death,” she admits. “I just finally grew my hair out after a decade of short hair. I just finally got it all together and then now this opportunity came up to really embrace taking a deeper look at how our hair defines us.”
“I'm a victim,” she adds. “My hair totally defines me sometimes. I won't leave the house if the hair's not right. I'll have a bad day if my hair's not right, or if I get a bad color job. I really want to take a look at that and I want to understand and break free of this hair bondage that I think a lot of us have. We all identify ourselves through our hair.”
Not many people remember B*A*P*S, the 1997 Robert Townsend comedy Berry made with Martin Landau and Natalie Desselle. But she says the pure physical comedy of that tale of two “home girls” who come to L.A. seeking fame and fortune is a hint what she still has not had the opportunity to really let loose with on the big screen. A big, goofy laugh fest.
“I took a lot of flack for doing B*A*P*S,” Berry recalls. “It was like physical comedy, and I love that. People don't know that about me, that I am sort of a klutz and sort of goofy. There's comedy in here, so much comedy. Just leave me alone and roll the camera.”
“Things get in my way when I'm trying to walk,” she continues. “It happens from time to time, but it's amazing because when I do it, it becomes a big deal, but if the next guy does it, nobody says a thing. If I fall down five stairs it's, ‘Oh Jesus, Halle has fallen!’ If the grip does it it's no big deal. I trip a lot, it's just the way it goes.”
| But even if, for a planned D.C. Comics Justice League movie, the character of Catwoman was re-imagined as the world’s biggest klutz with a tail, Berry says she would not be interested. “I'm not a masochist,” she says with a killer smile. “I love it, but my ego is in check and I'm not just going to do it for myself. I make movies for people and if people don't really want to see that then I wouldn't make the same mistake twice. I wouldn't choose to do that.” |
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