Halle Berry is good at leaking secrets, making her a reliable celebrity, if not always a contented actress.
Working a press junket in Toronto in March to promote her new movie, the lurid erotic thriller The Perfect Stranger, the actress grabbed the cover of The Toronto Sun by revealing why she first exposed her breasts on screen. According to Berry, her infamous Girls Gone Wild moment in the 1999 film Swordfish represented a personal and professional breakthrough.
"I needed to face this thing called nudity that I was afraid of," she confessed, opening up to reporter Bruce Kirkland. "To do it in a big, gratuitous way: 'Let's see the tits and move on!' " Only then, Berry argued, could she manage her Oscar-winning performance in the sexually charged Monster's Ball.
Even as the actress made front-page headlines in Toronto, Halle's publicity comet splashed down in supermarket magazines everywhere. In the pages of Parade, Berry admitted attempting suicide after her 1997 divorce to baseball player David Justice. ("I was sitting in my car, and I knew the gas was coming when I had an image of my mother finding me . . .") In Style readers learned that the 40-year-old indulged in a peculiar form of self-torture: hanging on to jeans she wore at 15. ("I try them on once a year, and if I can still fit into them, then all is good in the world.") In Esquire, meanwhile, she announced that she was giving up talking to blabby reporters. Berry wanted her self-image back.
But not, presumably, until after she was through championing The Perfect Stranger, the story of a sexy reporter (Berry) who investigates a sexy ad-agency tycoon (Bruce Willis) about his involvement in a sex murder. Ironically, the film is about keeping secrets.
You ask the actress: How far would you go to keep a secret?
"All the way," Berry laughs, tossing her beautiful bronze head back.
In his prime, Justice could not have batted one further out of the park with so short a swing.
Next question: Did Berry find it difficult completing The Perfect Stranger's sex scenes, especially the restaurant sequence where she plays footsies and handsies with co-star Willis? Was she at all intimidated making out with a perfect stranger who just happened to be a big film star?
"Oh, Bruce isn't a stranger," Berry mentions with the wave of a hand. "He's my neighbour. He has the beach house next to me in Malibu. When I committed to Perfect Stranger, I thought [the part of Harrison Hill]was perfect for him, so I walked over to his house with the script, knocked on the door, and said, 'I know everybody in the business hates it when someone does this, but here's a script I want you to read.' "
What did he say?
"He said, 'Cool.' "
Every time Berry opens her mouth, it seems, a choice quote tumbles free. Is it possible the actress's media savvy comes from her high-school journalism days in a suburb of Cleveland? You see, prior to moving into her Malibu beach house, long before Catwoman and her Oscar win, even before the actress was crowned Miss Teen America in 1986, Berry was editor of the Bedford Falls High School student newspaper. At the time, she wanted to become a reporter.
"Oh my God, Bedford Falls, football, basketball were the big things," Berry remembers, her ever-present smile widening.
You told judges in the Miss Teen Ohio contest that you wanted to be a television journalist. How far did your journalism career go?
"Not far," Berry says with a sigh. "When I went to [Cleveland's Cuyahoga Community College] there was this journalism class I took. First day, I remember, we had to go out and do three things, but I couldn't do the third."
Which was?
"I had to talk to someone. Do an interview."
Why didn't you?
"Don't know. I was too shy or something."
Perhaps here we're coming to the essential secret of Halle Berry. How difficult was it for the teenage daughter of a white single mother -- a Liverpool-born psychiatric nurse at that -- and a black father who left when she was 4 to grow up in Ronald Reagan's America? Especially in a locale that embodies not only America's cherished small-town values, but also its paralyzing fears: Bedford Falls is, of course, where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed went to high school (and almost encountered ruin) in the film It's a Wonderful Life.
Going to Bedford Falls High, Berry grew up ambitious enough to dream of winning Miss World (she finished sixth), yet frightened to talk to strangers. Eventually, she became a public contradiction: a shy actress. "I can't watch myself onscreen, my face the size of a Buick, every imperfection magnified," she says. Mind you, in the next breath, Berry freely admits to barging in on Bruce Willis.
The surest proof that Berry's childhood wars are never far from the surface: The actress's pet project is a proposed TV sitcom based on Angela Nissel's memoir, Mixed: My Life in Black and White.
"It's a comedy because you have to laugh at how adults in America, my generation -- and it was way worse before us -- dealt with mixed race," Berry says. "The kids are so much better about race today. They're colour-blind compared to their parents."
While she develops Mixed for TV, Berry continues working on films. Her next shoot, Tulia, is a crime drama that reunites her with Monster's Ball co-star Billy Bob Thornton. For now, she also continues giving interviews, spilling secrets to a group she now views with suspicion, despite her early ambition to be a reporter.
If you don't like seeing yourself on screen, how do you feel reading about yourself in magazines and newspapers? I ask Berry, prompting a final memorable quote: "Oh, I just want to barf," she says.