Halle Berry sustained many injuries while doing her passion project Bruised. But she made it a point not to tell anyone how bad her injuries were.
Halle Berry feared exposing her injuries would’ve shut ‘Bruised’ down
Bruised was a very important project for Berry. The 2021 sports drama was initially meant for Blake Lively to star in several years ago. But when Berry got a hold of the project, the piece resonated with her in such a way that she insisted to be the film’s star. Additionally, Berry also opted to direct the project when she couldn’t find another filmmaker who was right for the part.
“I didn’t know this is what I wanted to do,” she said in an interview with Goldderby. “I didn’t really set out to direct this. I wanted to be the actor to play this amazing character that I love so much within a sport that I loved so much. I only ended up directing it because I couldn’t really find someone that shared the vision that I had because I had to reimagine the story. It wasn’t written for someone like me. It was written for a very young, white, Irish-Catholic girl. So I had to reimagine it. I ended up directing it because I couldn’t find anyone that saw it the way I saw it.”
Berry would end up playing Jackie Justice, who was a retired MMA fighter looking to make a comeback. This required Berry to undergo an intense training regimen to move and look believable as a fighter. Due to the physicality of the role, however, Berry experienced many injuries. But she opted to keep her own bruises quiet for the sake of the movie.
“I knew if I told [producers] this happened, they would shut down and I would probably lose my funding. I just willed myself to do it,” she said in an interview with USA Today. “I took a bunch of Advil and I just acted as if it wasn’t happening.”
Halle Berry was happy to get her face messed up in ‘Bruised’
Berry saw Bruised as another opportunity for audiences to see beyond her looks. Although Berry’s career has certainly benefited from her good looks, it’s also stood in the way of the actor getting the roles she wants.
“It was intentional to not play the gorgeous girl,” Berry told W Magazine. “I came from the world of beauty pageants and modeling and right away when people heard that I got discounted as an actor.”
It was why Berry was determined to be cast in her breakthrough feature Jungle Fever. The Spike Lee movie famously saw the actor portray a drug addict, requiring Berry to significantly downplay her looks. When she first read for the part, Lee initially had Berry in mind to play his wife. But Berry insisted on playing the addict.
“Spike Lee wanted me to read for the part of his wife and I read that part fine enough, but then I said to Spike ‘You know I really am eyeing this crack ho role, can you please let me audition for that?’ And he said, ‘no, no I don’t see you as the crack ho,’” she recalled.
However, she managed to convince Lee that she was right for the part. Acquiring the role meant Berry was one step closer to accomplishing her goal.
“So, I had the job of trying to eliminate that part of my persona, and Spike gave me a chance to do that. And I took on roles early on that really didn’t rely on my physical self at all and that was a good way to sort of get some credibility within my industry,” she said.
Bruised held similar importance to Berry. Make-up helped give Berry’s face all of the black eyes and scars that often came with being a fighter. But it was a look she was proud of.
“Especially being me and people always commented on how I look, it was so liberating to wake up every day and the more [expletive] up I looked, the better it was going to be for the day’s work,” she said.
