Halle Berrrrrry, Halle Berry! (For all my Hurricane Chris fans, that was for you.)
Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry will be going on a sci-fi adventure in a new film for Netflix and MRC Film, The Mothership. Per Deadline, the movie will see Berry in the lead role of Sara Morse, a woman still grappling with her husband’s mysterious disappearance from their home farm almost a year after the fact. “When she discovers a strange, extraterrestrial object underneath their home, Sara and her kids embark on a race to find their husband, father, and most importantly–the truth.” Danny Stillman will executive produce alongside Berry, with Fred Berger and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones from Automatik banner set to produce as well. Matthew Charman, who wrote Bridge of Spies, has been tapped to pen The Mothership script and direct, making this his feature directorial debut.
Berry also just made her directorial feature debut at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival with her film, Bruised. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Bruised follows “a washed-up MMA fighter struggling for redemption as both an athlete and a mother. Jackie ‘Justice’ has been working multiple jobs and barely scraping by ever since losing an important match years ago. When her boyfriend, Desi manages to trick her into going to an underground fight, her passion for the sport is reignited. As Jackie prepares to go back to ‘the only thing she is good at,’ the son she once abandoned is dropped off at her doorstep. Confronted by her past choices and traumas, Jackie will have to fight to reclaim the two most meaningful things she has walked away from: 6-year-old Manny and an MMA title.”
Reflecting on her 2002 Oscar win and the slow progress the industry as a whole has made in fully recognizing the talents of Black women, Berry told Variety:
I thought, ‘Oh, all these great scripts are going to come my way; these great directors are going to be banging on my door.’ It didn’t happen. It actually got a little harder. They call it the Oscar curse. You’re expected to turn in award-worthy performances.” It’s one of my biggest heartbreaks. The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one… I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?’ I wanted to believe it was so much bigger than me. It felt so much bigger than me, mainly because I knew others should have been there before me and they weren’t.”
She added, “I thought Cynthia [Erivo, the star of ‘Harriet’] was going to do it. I thought Ruth [Negga, nominated for 2016’s ‘Loving’] had a really good shot at it too. I thought there were women that rightfully, arguably, could have, should have. I hoped they would have, but why it hasn’t gone that way, I don’t have the answer.”