What Happened To Halle Berry’s Career?

Back in the early aughts, everything seemed to be going well for Halle Berry. After years of starring in a slew of unimpressive films — a starring role in the cult hit B*A*P*S, or playing the damsel in distress in movies like The Rich Man’s Wife and Executive Decision — she had a string of successful roles. She landed the role of Storm in Brian Singer’s X-Men. She made an extra half-million dollars for baring her breasts in Swordfish. She played a Bond girl in Die Another Day. And her biggest achievement came in the spring of 2002, when she became the first African-American woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Monster’s Ball.

No one should have been surprised that Berry could act. She made that clear early in her career, delivering powerful performances in movies like Losing Isaiah and Queen. Just a few years before her Oscar win, she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, playing the Hollywood legend who was the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. Following her Monster’s Ball win, I don’t think I was the only person to expect her to easily balance her career with big-budget blockbusters and smaller character-driven dramas.

While she returned to the X-Men franchise the following year in X2: X-Men United, she made two immediate career missteps with Gothika, a tepid supernatural thriller that was a moderate box office success but a critical flop, and Catwoman, which proved a disappointing spin-off for the Batman villain. Her Storm character would return in two more films (X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006 and X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014), but otherwise Berry’s filmography has little successes in the years post-Monster’s Ball. With the exception of Cloud Atlas, the ambitious Wachowskis-Tom Tykwer adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel, Berry played it safe. There are a couple of small dramas: Things We Lost in the Fire and Frankie and Alice, neither of which garnered much attention. She joined the ranks of A-list actors who showed up for a two-day shoot on one of Garry Marshall’s holiday-themed ensemble pictures (in Berry’s case, New Year’s Eve).

Now she’s on a TV show: the moody sci-fi drama Extant, which seems, at least from its ads, as ridiculous as it is difficult to pronounce. And it makes me wonder: how did this great actress, who broke a major barrier for women of color in Hollywood, end up on a network drama? There’s no easy answer, of course, but there are two very obvious factors that likely played a part in Berry’s career in the last ten years: she’s a woman, and she’s African-American.

It’s difficult to deny the systemic forces in Hollywood, which favors male actors over female stars. You can see that in the starring roles Berry has had since Monster’s Ball: always playing a woman in peril rather than a strong, self-assured leading role. When she does get the chance to play characters that have a certain amount of strength and vigor, they’re typically in ensemble casts or playing second-fiddle to the male lead.

And while Berry is the rare woman of color to have played a variety of roles in which her ethnicity is not a central part of the narrative, the fact remains that her identity is a hindrance when it comes to landing those meatier, serious films. Her two best films — Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and Monster’s Ball — feature race as a major theme. That’s the sort of subject matter white audiences want from their films starring African-American actors; when a film doesn’t feature a heavy-handed persecution narrative, it seems to go unnoticed by viewers.

What happened to Halle Berry’s career? It’s a tricky question, and one for which there isn’t a simple answer. But I hope this return to TV is just a detour, and that Berry is able to find film roles that suit her talents and status as an A-list actor.

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Photos courtesy of Everett Collection