HOLLYWOOD -- Make the assumptions, make a mistake. Halle Berry is dangerously drop-dead beautiful, she rose to public prominence as a beauty queen, she excelled as a Chicago model and she played one on TV's shortlived and little mourned sitcom Living Dolls - so she obviously must lack brainpower and certainly lacks talent as an actress. Because that's one of the hoariest of all Hollywood cliches - the bimbo model who aspires to movie stardom only to crash and burn into obscurity.
Filmmaker Stephen Gyllenhaal made the assumptions and now happily admits it was a mistake. Berry co-stars with Jessica Lange in Gyllenhaal's searing new dramatic movie, Losing Isaiah, and it's a role that could catapult her career a giant step forward. Gyllenhaal says that Berry not only is smart and talented, but she is headed for bona fide stardom.
Losing Isaiah, the emotionally complex, color-concerned story of a black woman whose abandoned baby is adopted by a white woman, opens in Toronto on Friday. It turns out that nothing in the movie is as simple as black-and-white, although color is everything to some of the characters.
The irony is that Gyllenhaal auditioned Berry for the pivotal role in Losing Isaiah strictly to be polite to her and her agents and to acknowlege that she already had movie credits with small roles in Jungle Fever, The Flintstones, Father Hood, The Program, Boomerang, Strictly Business and The Last Boy Scout.
"I saw nothing in her work that suggested she could do this," Gyllenhaal admits candidly now. "I assumed she couldn't handle it. I assumed that anyone that beautiful couldn't act (an idea he says is obviously absurd, even to him). I was wrong!"
For her part, Berry is now sanguine about the attitude she encountered when pursuing Losing Isaiah with a vengeance that was so obviously shot through with desperation. Gyllenhall saw her only as "a courtesy call," she confesses.
"I knew there was a lot of skepticism," she says softly in a thin but enchanting musical voice that suggests none of the fire within. "I can be honest with myself and realize why. My career is very new. I haven't proven myself in many ways. I haven't had the opportunity (she later catalogues the obvious, that blacks have fewer opportunities to strut their stuff in strong roles).
"So I can understand how he felt. I understand that this is a big movie for Paramount and a big deal for him as a director. And it was important I could hold my own with Jessica Lange (herself a former model, which inspires Berry to feel a deep kinship with Lange).
"I understood all that. I think what that did is just light a fire under my butt! To prove I was on this mission, I had tunnel vision. One time (her second audition, the one that made her a serious candidate for the role), I came in too emotional. I was just a wreck because I wanted it so badly. I was just filled with emotion, not only from the character (who is a crackhead who goes for legal custody of her child after cleaning herself up in a drug rehab program), but from within myself.
"Because I wanted it so badly. I wanted this chance to prove that I could do this. As a woman and as a black woman, roles like this just aren't around. Right away, I knew that this was special because of the arc the character makes. I get to shed my physical self and get to what's real, what's really inside of me.
"And I think the issue (custody of children, especially in cross-racial situations) is something that I felt really passionate about. It is important to me that I'm part of something that may help incite change. We provide no answers. It's no easy subject. But I hope it will just get people talking and make people realize that the real issue in all of these cases is not the lawyers, is not the mothers, is not being politically correct, it's the child."
Berry is 26. She is the Cleveland-born offspring of a white mother and a black father who left her mother, a nurse, when Halle was four years old. As a single mom, Judy Berry raised Halle and her older sister Heidi in the predominently white Cleveland suburbs of Bedford and Oakwood Village.
"I'm black," Berry once said of her self-awareness of race. "I realized very early in my life that I wasn't going to be this mulatto stuck in the middle (not knowing) if I'm black or white." Married to baseball star David Justice, right fielder for the Atlanta Braves when real baseball is being played, Berry splits her time between homes in Atlanta and Los Angeles. She calls herself both ambitious and selfish.
Selfish because she is putting off plans for children until she is about 35. Ambitious because she wants a Hollywood career. Her life as a model was simply "playing it safe." Continuing to play the small roles in the movies she did before Losing Isaiah would also be a copout. "For me, playing it safe is playing stereotypical roles. The Flintstones (in which she played the sexually vamping secretary) was playing it safe for me in that I didn't feel vulnerable one bit. It was just fun and safe."
Losing Isaiah, however, did make her feel enormously vulnerable. She has never been a crackhead in life - although she also played one in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever - but she has researched the lifestyle. And she does have her own reservoirs of deep, dark feeling.
"My life is not without pain and suffering," she intones about her method acting and her personal connection to the woman in Losing Isaiah (the character's name is Khaila). "It is not without good times and bad times, without great happiness and great sadness.
"I think for a lot of the scenes, I had to really draw on some of the pain in my life, and revisit that time, live there for a while and bring all of that stuff up and try to channel it into Khaila in the best way that I could." Berry doesn't mention it in today's interview but she has revealed in the past that some of her teen boyfriends were jealous and abusive. One clouted her in the head, causing the permanent loss of 80% of her hearing in one ear.
If her still waters run deep, Berry could fulfill the promise that directors such as Gyllenhaal see in her now. But, for her part, Berry says her fate in Hollywood is not personal, but financial. Her goal is to earn the opportunity to consistently play major black characters who have positive and not stereotypical traits.
"I think when we prove we're worth money, I think that's when we'll get it," she says of realizing her ambition. "It's all about money in Hollywood and that's why I can't take it all that personally. It's just about dollars and cents. When we start making movies that show black people in a positive way, and people come out to support them, when those films make money, I'll have all the chances in the world!"
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