Before the premiere of her new movie “Crime 101,” Halle Berry recently got down with The Cut for a profile. In it, she disclosed that she once told Cynthia Erivo not to put too much importance on winning an Oscar.
Berry became the first Black woman to be awarded the Oscar for best actress for her performance in “Monster’s Ball,” while Erivo has received two nominations for the award of best actress (“Harriet” and “Wicked”).
“That Oscar didn’t necessarily change the course of my career,” Berry told the outlet. “After I won it, I thought there was going to be, like, a script truck showing up outside my front door. 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 said to her adjacent actor, “You goddamn deserve it, but I don’t know that it’s going to change your life,” as Erivo’s acting career flourished years afterwards with its own Oscar nominations. “It cannot be the validation for what you do, right?”
In a 2020 interview with Variety, Berry listed Ruth Negga’s portrayal in “Loving” and Erivo’s in “Harriet” as Black women’s Oscar-caliber roles. Later, she expanded the list to include Viola Davis from “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and Andra Day from “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”
“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,” adding that her victory was still “one of my biggest heartbreaks.”
