So if you’d like to hear Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas (Producer) or James Foley (Director) click on either name (the files are MP3’s). I will warn you though… both interviews contain MAJOR spoilers and if you don’t want to know the secrets of this film I would not listen until you have seen the movie. But if you have the time and want to listen to a crazy interview listen to James Foley. Seriously I have never heard someone give an interview like this. It has to be heard to be believed.

But enough of the other people, you clicked on this article to read about Halle.

In person Halle is every bit as gorgeous as she looks on screen. During the interview she mentioned how she had recently turned 40 and I couldn’t believe it. I swear scientists need to study her and analyse everything.

While the interview has all the usual stuff, the one highlight was her revealing that she’ll be shaving her head bald for an upcoming role. It was when someone asked if she has a character she’s yearning to play:

Well, I’d really like to be in a romantic comedy and I do have one coming up called Nappily Ever After that the women in the room would totally... I’m going to shave my hair, shave my head bald for this movie.

Seriously?

I can’t wait. I’m going to be greasehead bald. I play this woman Venus, who ... the movie, it’s all about a woman ... you know that relationship that women ... guys, just bear with me for one second ... the relationship that women have with their hair and how hair throughout history has defined us and how we’re in such bondage, you know and everything is if my hair’s not right then we’re not right. So my character, at the beginning of the movie, something is done to her and her hair starts to fall out and you know ... and so she decides one night after being drunk trying to deal with the fact that their hair is dragged up, she’s drunk and she decides to shave her hair completely bald and now she has to face you know, the next morning with no hair and how her whole life and everybody around her is now different and behaves differently because she was this beautiful goddess with this long hair and now she’s bald and how she’s different now, and she’s forced to look at what beauty really is and it comes from inside obviously, not from the outside but it’s a hard lesson for us to get and this movie will sort of expose that and help us sort of come to terms and may be every time we hear thunder, we won’t go like running for cover.

I’m sure the paparazzi will be fighting to get this photograph.

Again the interview was done in roundtable form which explains the wide variety of questions. If you’re not familiar with the term roundtable, that’s when the studio gets anywhere between 4 and 15 journalists around a table taking turns asking questions. Obviously each person is writing a story and has an agenda and that explains why certain questions were asked. While I might be interested in the craft of acting…when you are at a table with US Weekly you know what they’re going to ask about...

If you’d like to listen to the audio of the interview – click here – it’s an MP3 and easily played on any portable player. Otherwise you can read it below.

And here is a link to the trailer in case you haven’t seen it and here is the studio provided synopsis:

Perfect Stranger asks the question: How far would you go to keep a secret?  When investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) learns that her friend’s murder might be connected to powerful ad executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), she goes undercover with the help of her associate, Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi).  Posing as Katherine, a temp at Hill’s agency, and Veronica, a girl Hill flirts with online, Rowena surrounds her prey from all sides, only to discover that she isn’t the only one changing identities.  The closer we get to learning the truth, the more we understand how far people will go to protect it.

Perfect Stranger opens on Friday the 13^th

Question: Well, you actually took journalism at school and...

Halle Berry: Very briefly must I say.

Alright, did you, I mean what kind of journalist did you want to be? Did you want to be like your character? Did you want to do investigative work, or did you want to do this hard core junket reporting that we do.

I want to do this hard core stuff you guys do. Well, unfortunately because I didn’t study it long enough, I hadn’t really decided that yet. So I really don’t know, but I knew that I was a good writer in high school and won awards, and I was the editor of my school newspaper. So I knew that I was a good writer and I wanted to somehow capitalise and sort of utilise a talent that I thought I had. How it would have manifested, I don’t really know.

So why were you so passionate about playing this role, because your producer and director both said that you apparently were really in character so?

Well, you know, I love a character that gives me a chance to grow and do something different, and Row was so multifaceted, you know. I never played a character who played a character who played a character you know, and that gave me a chance as an artist to sort of stretch my limits and to challenge myself, and I was you know ... when I read the movie and I got to the end, I thought wow, I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off but if I can but I’m going to go down trying because that’s how impassioned I was about it.

My favourite line in the movie or I guess one of the best lines in the movie is about the powerful... the words about powerful women and shitty men. Was that a line...

I wish I knew. The course of my life would be different if I knew the answer to that question.

Did you find that funny when you read that?

Hysterical, hysterical, hysterical and I wish I had learned the answer to that before the age of 40.

No, life might’ve been boring.

Yeah, okay. Life would’ve been a big bore.

Do you find yourself feeling a little wiser now? I mean are you still God, you’re learning or what’s ... you know, where are you right now in terms of that kind of thing in life?

Always learning because I think as long as we’re here, if we’re logged on at all to this experience, then we’re learning. But I do think ... I would say a magical thing happened when my ... when the big 40th birthday came. It was really magical in a way for me. I felt like a light kind of just went off and may be because I felt like at 40, I had the right to you know say and be who I wanted to be and say what I wanted to say and not accept what I didn’t want to accept, like may be it was me that felt the shift, but I do think I’ve gotten wiser and I’ve learned lots of lessons.

What do you mean the light went on when you turned 40?

I felt more self-assured, more confident. I felt like half my life is probably over now and I felt like I had the right to really be authentically who I want to be and say what I want to say, and not accept what didn’t feel right and I don’t think I felt confident enough to do that before 40 really. Not across the board on all levels. I was doing it in certain areas but now, I can happily say I can do that across the board.

Are you at the point where you don’t care what people think?

Yeah... I was getting there slowly by slowly when I turned 35 but at 40, I really get it in a real way. It doesn’t matter what they think. Do people really care? Nobody goes home really pondering what Halle Berry did or said.

You kissed the star yesterday.

Yeah ... it was and then somebody told ... reminding me, do you know that crack heads and drug addicts and ... then I thought thanks, did you have to remind me, you know. But yeah, it was just a spontaneous thing. I felt so proud of it and I felt like that’s what I wanted to do, so that’s what I did.

You have an Emmy, a Golden Globe, you have an Oscar, you have a star. What is it that’s left for you to do? What is it that you really want to do with the next half of your life now? Maybe a Grammy?

A Grammy! If I won a Grammy, that’d be doing something. Lucky, I can’t hold a note. If I could win a Grammy...

We can fix that in the studio, girl.

... that’ll tell me nothing.

Can you think of something you really want to do?

Yeah, there’s lots of things. You know, I mean I want to be a mother, like that feels really important. Career is one thing and I think I’ve gotten a lot out of this career and made the most of my opportunities but I am starting to feel like I need something more meaningful to wake me up in the morning, and it’s feeling very much like it’s family, it’s children, it’s ... you know.

Are you thinking about numbers? How many?

Oh God, I’m just hoping for one. I’m just hoping for one right now.

What kind of relationship did you have with director on the set?

A very ... you know, he is and you ask anybody and I would you know bet my life on this. You ask any actor that he has worked with and they all have loved him. They had to have. He is an actor’s director. He is one of these unique directors that actually has the vocabulary to speak to actors and that’s a different language really because actors sometimes, you know, have to hear words from an organic place, not an intellectual places because sometimes, the choices we make as actor don’t ... aren’t based in anything cerebral. They’re just human emotions that are unexplainable sometimes and James Foley knows how to speak to us in those terms and he supports us. I remember on the first day of shooting ... did you hear this story about how he ... like on the first day of shooting, you know on the movie for the first time, you know everybody’s a little tense. As actors, we’re all very insecure and we just want the director to like what we’ve been working on the night before for the first day. So I’m with Giovanni and we’re in that Chemley scene at the restaurant and we do the first take, and after the first take everyone of us is kind of you know, looking like okay, was that okay? How was that? And all we hear from another room, because he’s in another room watching the monitor, we hear ah [screaming], yes. We’re like what the hell was that? And it’s James Foley and he was back and he’s like ah [screaming], and that was the tone that he set and when we did something that he loved, we got that and when we didn’t, of course he didn’t but when we can get that from him and we all felt like okay.

He also said that you were 100% comfortable with your beauty because there is ... there’s one scene in this movie where you’re dressed incredibly and the camera does accentuate your physicality which is fine with me. But where’s that comfort zone come from and why do you ... is it easy for you to still be comfortable with that side of you?

I think that’s also come with 40, you know and just getting older. I’ve become really comfortable with my sexuality and making no excuses for it anymore. It’s part of being a woman; its part of what empowers us when we’re smart enough to know how to use it. The character of Row certainly knew how to use it, and I think I’ve been learning as I’ve gotten older. I’ve become comfortable with that side of who I am. In the beginning, I used to have to downplay it because I wanted to be taken so seriously as a thespian and as an artist and as an actor, so I’d play crack heads and down trotting women and disguise myself, and I think as I’ve gotten older, I become more comfortable with who I really am and all parts of me knowing that my physical self doesn’t diminish me in any way or my talent.

You have some really intense close-ups in this movie when you’re on the computer. Were you like plucking and waxing right before? It’s right there.

You tell me. Should I have been?

You looked very unplucked to me.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, I was not plucking and waxing moments before.

Did you have any feeling about the camera being right there in your face?

Well, I try ... you know, I’m not an actor who knows where the camera ever is. I’ve worked with actors who are always aware of not only where the camera is but what lens is on the camera. I’m sort of oblivious to it. I try to black it out. I never care if it’s on me, not on me, if it’s a close shot or a wide shot, I believe you have to do 100% your best every shot ... you know, every take. So no, I really wasn’t aware. I probably should’ve been. Once seeing the movie, I’ll probably think I should’ve like said something about that but I really don’t ... I don’t care.

At this point in your career, what validates the work for you? What other people say is what you just feel instinctually? I mean do you know when you’ve nailed it and you’ve hit it?

I never really know when I’ve nailed it or when I’ve hit it. I think what validates it today is the fans. When people come up to me, I mean a lot of people ... now you’re all going to probably walk up out of this room right now when I say this. I’m going to say it anyway. A lot of fans, a lot of people liked Catwoman and it’s validated... come on ... be less questions I have to answer ... Come on. But you’d be surprised how many people, especially young girls, came up and they really liked it and so that’s the validation. I try to focus on the positive of things and so the validation is really from the fans because that’s who we make movies for, for people and for fans and I think it’s our job to offer them a variety, you know and do different kinds of things and so ...

But if you didn’t have that validation from them, would you feel okay about the work?

Oh, yeah because I know every time for good or for bad, I give 100% of what I have to give in that moment and I make choices based on what’s happening in my life at that moment, what I’m most needing to do, sometimes for personal reasons, sometimes for the art of it. So knowing that I make decisions from the right place, I can live with that at night, no matter what the outcome of the project.

You have some upcoming projects that sound very interesting.

Oh, yes.

Class Act for example, is that which Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas (The Producer) was very excited about?

Yes, we’re the producer of that, yeah.

There are a lot of movies about teachers. Can you talk about what you’re going to bring to this ... to that woman that might be different from other women that you’ve played?

We’ll see, I don’t know yet. I haven’t even begun to delve into who that woman is right now. So I’ll tell you about it on that junket because I really don’t ... you know, it’s something that’s not really close to me right now. That’d probably not go for another year and a half.

Not before that?

Probably. Mm?

Before that, then you’ve got?

I’ve got a movie coming out in the fall called Things We Lost in the Fire with Benicio Del Toro directed by Susanne Bier, a Danish director.

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