A New Level of Comfort

Other people’s opinions: Actress Halle Berry doesn’t live for them anymore.

And that, in a nutshell, is the answer to the nudity question.

Berry is ensconced in a room in the fashion-forward Time Hotel in midtown Manhattan, here to talk about “Monster’s Ball,” a tough film about the unexpected relationship between a racist death row prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and the widow of one of the black men he has helped execute.

There’s plenty to discuss about this brooding, provocative film--but Berry finds that all anyone (read: reporters) wants to talk about is the film’s steamy, progressively undressed love scene she plays with Thornton in the film. Or her 42-second (according to a Web site that measures such things) topless shot in last year’s “Swordfish.” Or the fact that, after a decade in the movies, she chose to take off her clothes at all.

“There are a lot of issues people are not asking about,” she says of the press’ fascination with her nude scenes.

On an unseasonably warm December day in Manhattan, Berry is a vision in a bone-colored knit dress--but one gets the feeling she’d be a vision in a sweatsuit after a 5-mile run. Her looks, she maintains, are exactly the thing that have stood in her way of playing roles such as Leticia Musgrove in “Monster’s Ball,” a part she had to fight to get.

In a sense, Berry has battled what she calls “the model image” right from the start of her career, when she convinced Spike Lee she could play a crack addict in “Jungle Fever” and again when she won the right to play a woman who aged into her senior years in Alex Haley’s “Queen.” But despite well-regarded acting turns in “Losing Isaiah” and “Bulworth,” she still struggles against the perception that she’s too beautiful to play a troubled character.

“That’s the thing I run up against: She’s too pretty, she’s the face of Revlon,” says Berry, 33, who won the Miss Teen All-American Pageant in 1985, representing Ohio from her native Cleveland. “People think that if you look this way, you can’t be downtrodden. They have this stereotyped image--and it’s nice to challenge stereotypes. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs.”

The daughter of an African American father and a white mother who divorced when she was 4, Berry battled for this role in a story about the ways racial hatred is passed down from generation to generation--and the ways it can be overcome.

“Being the product of an interracial marriage, I’ve always known the racial divide is insane and ridiculous,” she says. “This film speaks to the issue that people are racist because they are taught to be. Those attitudes are passed down without meaning. The sad part is that these people don’t even understand why they believe what they believe. But in this film, those beliefs get challenged.”

The film got a jump-start before it even opened, when the National Board of Review named Berry and Thornton as best actress and actor of the year. Berry subsequently was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an American Film Institute Award as best actress. But she said the NBR award, coming in early December, almost a month before the film’s opening, moved her to tears.

“I think I had an out-of-body experience,” she says. “This is an independent movie that I thought would not get noticed in that way. I just hoped that it would get other directors to see me differently. What I hoped when I got the role was to get people talking, to draw people to the theater to get the message. So the awards are a great thing to happen to an independent movie. We hope they make people curious enough to see the film.”

Even a couple of years ago, Berry would have read the “Monster’s Ball” script, gotten to the surprisingly explicit love scene--and tossed the script aside.

“All I’d have to hear was ‘nude scene’ and I’d say, ‘Don’t send me that,’” she says. “I’m sure I passed up wonderful scripts that I never read because I knew they required nudity.”

The reason: the fear of disappointing other people. Having been class president and prom queen in high school (where she was also an honor society member and editor of the school newspaper), Berry grew up eager to please others. She found that, as her fame and visibility increased, so did the hopes of people she didn’t even know, whose belief in her as a role model brought surprising pressure to bear on Berry’s psyche.

“I worked hard to be what people wanted,” she says. “I used to be obsessed with wanting their approval, way back to my childhood. Particularly the black community. So many black people would approach me and say, ‘My daughter aspires to be like you. Stay positive.’ So I’d try to stay that way.

“I thought that if I did nudity, I’d let them down and send the wrong message to those girls. But then I realized it’s not my job to raise those girls.”

There were turning points that changed her perception of herself: her very public divorce from baseball star David Justice (including allegations that he abused her), her fulfillment of the dream to produce and star in an HBO film about the late film star Dorothy Dandridge (for which she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe).

The watershed event, however, was the car accident on Feb. 23, 2000, that jeopardized Berry’s career and made her the butt of bad-driver jokes by late-night TV comics. Berry ultimately pleaded no contest to a hit-and-run charge after she allegedly ran a red light in her Chevy Blazer and struck another car. The other driver suffered a broken wrist, as well as neck and back injuries; Berry, who received 22 stitches for a gash in her forehead, reported the accident to police at the hospital she drove to for treatment after the accident. She was fined $13,500 and sentenced to 200 hours of community service and settled out of court a civil suit filed by the other driver.

Berry says now that, in a strange way, the experience freed her from worrying about what other people thought of her “because people already thought the worst you could think about me--and my life went on.” She found that although she suffered a firestorm of publicity, she emerged from the experience intact.

“That was the start of me being released from that need to be liked,” she says. “Initially, it was all painful--the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I was dealing with serious legal uncertainty about my future. I couldn’t speak out, so I had to risk people thinking I was this terrible, evil person. And I was hearing people make light of it on TV. It hurt.

“As time went on, I got a thicker skin. People still make jokes about it, but I’m not the first person to have a problem like this--and I won’t be the last. I had to learn who I was and not look to other people to validate me. I couldn’t allow the bad things the press was saying about me to color how I felt about myself.

“And now I’m more in control of who I am. I know who I am--and that’s what’s important.”

Having been annealed in the media fires, all it took was a little push from new husband Eric Benet for her to consider the roles in “Swordfish” and “Monster’s Ball.”

“I was so afraid of being exposed in that way,” she says. “The social milieu of this country is that nudity is wrong or bad. Finally, with ‘Swordfish,’ my husband said, ‘Why are you afraid of this? Are you embarrassed about your body?’ I said no. So he said, ‘What’s the problem?’ When I told him people expected something different from me, he said I should do what I wanted to do.

“He also told me to look around our house. Every piece of art is of the naked form. ‘And you bought it all,’ he said. And I realized I was allowing what people thought of me to stop me.

“So I decided I’m going to live for me. I’m going to do this.”

Which didn’t stop rumors that Berry had balked at the “Swordfish” nude scene and demanded an extra half-million dollars to do it (untrue, she says). Those notions will be set aside by her heated encounter with Thornton in “Monster’s Ball,” she believes.

“It was a 21-day shoot--and we did that scene on Day 20,” she recalls. “So it was like we dated for three weeks first.”

That’s considerably less time than she devoted to her relationship with singer Benet before marrying him in January 2001. Berry, whose four-year marriage to baseball star Justice (now of the Oakland A’s) ended in a 1996 divorce, was engaged to Benet for almost two years before they tied the knot.

“There’s a reason the first marriage didn’t work,” she says. “But I learned so much through the process about myself. I think this time around I was better able to choose a better mate for myself. I understand better what I need and was able to choose a partner who was more compatible. Still, I was a little skeptical. We dated for quite a while this time.”

Berry is waiting for shooting schedules on her next two films, hoping that potential conflicts between overlapping productions of “X-Men 2” and the next James Bond film (in which she’s cast as the villain) can be resolved so that she will be able to make both films. While she’s looking forward to a reunion with her “X-Men” cast mates (“I’m looking forward to us putting on the suits again”), the opportunity to be a Bond villain plays right into her newfound urge to explore previously off-limits aspects of her personality.

“It would be great to play a bad girl,” she says. “I’ve never done that on film before. We can’t be bad in life: You get in trouble and go to jail. So it would be a thrill to do things in a surreal world, with lots of fighting and bad-ass stuff. I don’t do that in life.”