Halle Berry's Historic Oscar Win Didn’t Open Hollywood Doors

Halle Berry may be royalty in just about every Black household, but her historic win as the first and only Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar in 2002 didn’t move the needle when it came to helping her Hollywood career.

According to The Cut, which sat down with Berry to profile all things in her love life and movies, including the release of her upcoming feature Crime 101, Berry recalled her historic win–for her work in Lee Daniels’ Monster’s Ball–“didn’t necessarily change the course of my career. After I won it, I thought there was going to be, like, a script truck showing up outside my front door.”

She continued, “While I was wildly proud of it, I was still Black that next morning. Directors were still saying, ‘If we put a Black woman in this role, what does this mean for the whole story? Do I have to cast a Black man? Then it’s a Black movie. Black movies don’t sell overseas.’” 

Berry also noted that she told Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, who was nominated several times for the Best Actress Oscar: “You goddamn deserve it, but I don’t know that it’s going to change your life. It cannot be the validation for what you do, right?”

Berry’s candid honesty about her career highlights a similar sentiment expressed by actress Lupita Nyong’o last year. During a conversation with CNN, Nyong’o’s Academy Award-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave — led to studios offering her more roles as a slave and very little outside of that.

“You know what’s interesting is that, after I won that Academy Award, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get lead roles here and there.’ [Instead, it was], ‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award,” Nyong’o said.

“Berry has a slate of upcoming projects and has gone toe-to-toe with Gov. Gavin Newsom over his vetoing of a menopause bill, a point of contention stemming from her menopause wellness and advocacy company Respin, which she initially launched in 2020 and retooled last year,” Deadline reports. 

Halle Berry’s Historic Oscar Win Didn’t Open Hollywood Doors: “I Was Still Black That Next Morning” was originally published on cassiuslife.com