Few people exude beauty and talent quite like Halle Berry, an actress who has surpassed most cultural barriers in contemporary society through her work.
Yet in her latest big screen project, Cloud Atlas, the actress goes beyond the norm in a gender-bending, race-defying performance that imagines her as both man and woman – black, white and brown – in a dramatic interpretation of the cycles of humanity.
In the film, hitting theaters Friday, Berry embodies six different characters of multiple ethnicities to depict the story of eternal life throughout the ages. For the Academy Award-winning actress, it was a chance to break anew; to show the range of her façade; and to tackle roles she’s never been able to play in the past, most significantly that of a Jewish white woman named Jocasta Ayrs.
“To tell you the story, I was in a costume fitting with [director] Tom Tykwer trying to bring Jocasta to life, and he was bringing out one costume after the next to try them on,” the 46-year-old tells theGrio at a press junket in Los Angeles.
“He was like, ‘Oh, you look so beautiful, you must have worn dresses like this from 1932 before.’ And I just looked at him and I said, ‘You think I have, really? You think so? As an actor, you think I’ve done this before?’”
She continues, “All the sudden, he goes, ‘Oh you’re black; you’re not really white. You wouldn’t have been this kind of woman in 1935 ever, right?’”
It’s a truth Berry has recognized throughout her career, taking on the relics of racial disharmony in films like Monster’s Ball, Losing Isaiah, and TV movies such as Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Though she is biracial, many of her roles have been a specific interpretation of the African-American experience, making her latest gig a particularly interesting experiment in reinventing racial constructs.
In Cloud Atlas, Berry moves beyond classification, portraying an African native in the era of slavery; the well-to-do wife of a famous composer in 1930’s Belgium; a young, in-the-know investigative journalist chronicling the volatile scene of San Francisco in the 1970’s; an Indian party guest in present times; an Asian doctor in a future-esque metropolis; and a superhuman following the end of time. The movie illuminates the concept of an ongoing spirit – reincarnated, karma-driven or perhaps simply embedded in a universal consciousness – and surmises how individual stories shape the collective tale of time.
Accordingly, Berry says the chance to throw out former notions of what she was eligible for as an actress was a big reason she joined the project in the first place
“I did love being turned into Dr. Ovid,” the actress remarks about her scenes playing an Asian man. “Never before in my life would I ever have thought anybody would ever hire me to be an Asian man for any reason.”
The movie unfolds as a menagerie of intersecting storylines from the past, present, and future worlds of human existence. It attempts to dispel preconceptions associated with age, race, class, and gender by casting the actors in all roles, and challenging assumptions about identity. In many cases, the disenfranchised of society prove the most heroic, and by contrast to historical paradigm, in the post-apocalyptic future, it is Berry – a black herculean-type woman – who serves the dominant and advanced civilization. Each character becomes either the positive or negative catalyst for its re-embodied soul.
In real life, Berry acknowledges she believes in reincarnation, and says she feels this film allowed her to step beyond the bounds and limits by which she generally is constrained.
“I love the totality of all the characters,” Berry explains. “To be an old native in the 1800s, and then go to be, you know, this extra-terrestrial kind of like being from another planet that came down to help this other group of people. I felt like it was such a diverse group of people that I got asked to play.”
The complexity and number of roles required every actor in the film to spend three days with the make-up crew prior to production to get the looks accurate and believable. The results are remarkable, as in many cases, the usually recognizable cast of A-listers, including Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Keith David, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, and Jim Broadbent, often slip by unnoticed in their new casings. It was a choice made by the filmmaking team – Tykwer along with The Matrix director siblings, Andy and Lana Wachowski – to interpret the idea of one vision, and respect for all identities. It was also a big incentive for such high-caliber talent to join the project.
Admits Berry, the film was a “no money job,” merely the chance to be a part of an “innovative” production.
“This is so poignant for an actor, someone like me, to sort of be able to shed my skin, and do something, you know, I would never have been able to do if it weren’t for this kind of people,” she notes.
And incidentally, there was a moment when Berry feared she might get cast out of the project after breaking several bones in her foot two days into shooting.
“I sat there in my bed, foot up in the air; I got a call saying Tom and Andy and Lana want to come talk to you,” she remembers. “I thought they were going to give me my walking papers, and say you know, ‘We love you, but too many people are involved, too many schedules have been made for too many years, and you know, we’re bringing in Angela Bassett.”
Fortunately for the star, that wasn’t the case, and, as she describes it, the whole team rallied to make it work and keep her on board. Similarly, Berry considers the film a collaborative effort, an anomaly ensemble piece where every actor takes on parts, major to minor, all embracing the unified sentiment of the theme.
She adds, “I felt like I’m doing something that’s unique, and that I’ll never have a chance to do again.”
Follow Courtney Garcia on Twitter at @courtgarcia