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“I live right up the street,” Halle Berry says to me. We’re in the lobby of a private, members-only club on bustling Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. She’s arrived five minutes early and without some hulking black SUV that will idle at the curb to whisk her away when this is over. Makeup-free, she looks approachable in roomy jeans paired with a sheer black tee under a baggy blazer.
The lack of pretense, I learn, is no front. Once we sit down, she orders lemon-ginger tea and launches into a topic most of us will only broach after a few glasses of wine: dry vaginas. “Look, it happens to more than 60 percent of women as we get older. Everything gets dry! If we talk about it and laugh about it, there’s no more shame or embarrassment.” It’s a topic Berry is passionate about — she founded a health platform focused on menopause care in 2020. “I’m almost 60,” she says. “Fighting for women’s health feels like a formidable cause for my second act.”
Growing older, and all the public invisibility that can entail, has been on her mind. Her new film, Crime 101, a smart, gritty caper about a serial thief (Chris Hemsworth) planning his final heist, features Berry as a sexy middle-aged insurance broker named Sharon Coombs, who flaunts her cleavage to close deals with billionaire clients. In one scene, Sharon’s boss taunts her about her age, implying she’s spoiled milk. “Halle actually asked me to write that speech into the script,” says director Bart Layton. “I don’t know many actors who would have the confidence and bravery to be that vulnerable. But it’s because of where she’s at in her life.” In another scene, we watch her character wield a gold wand of YSL’s Touche Éclat concealer in the mirror as she gets ready for work. She camouflages the dark circles under her eyes, hesitates, then swipes the formula over most of her face like war paint. “Her character rang so true for me. You get to this age where you feel like you’re being marginalized, devalued. You feel it at work. You feel it from society,” Berry says. “But I have adamantly decided I am not going to allow myself to be erased. That’s why I’m on my menopause mission. I’m going to be louder than I have ever been.” Part of that mission involves telling more onscreen stories, including comedies, about middle-aged women and poking fun at herself along the way. “When you get older, you stop getting sized up like a pork chop,” she says.
The manager pops by our table. “Is Van coming in?” he asks, referring to Berry’s boyfriend, the musician Van Hunt. “No, and he’s going to be so jealous,” she says, pointing at the plate of chicken strips between us. They laugh knowingly. “Van loves these,” Berry tells me.
Berry has been really famous for more than three decades — and continues to be the only Black woman who’s won a Best Actress Oscar. But she still feels mostly misunderstood, often branded by her romantic relationships, including three ex-husbands: the baseball player David Justice, the singer Eric Benét, and the French actor Olivier Martinez, with whom she shares a 12-year-old son, Maceo-Robert. Each relationship ended with a fair number of tabloid headlines, focusing on splashy details like a custody battle with Martinez and another with ex-boyfriend and actor Gabriel Aubry, the father of her daughter, Nahla Ariela, who is 17.
“After my third divorce, people started to say, ‘What’s wrong with her? She’s crazy. She can’t keep a man,’” she recalls. “And I would always argue, ‘Who says I want to keep a man if he’s not the right man?’” (By all appearances, Berry seems perfectly happy to keep Hunt. “I’m in the best relationship I have ever had,” she says. The two met during COVID in 2020, set up by Hunt’s brother. They texted and talked on the phone for four months before their first IRL date.) “I pretty much stopped doing interviews for a decade because I got tired of the same old story,” she continues. “It was always: ‘Poor Halle — Unlucky in Love Again.’” When I ask her to come up with her own headline to set the record straight, she closes her eyes. “Hmm. ‘Halle Berry Is Not a Damsel in Distress.’” Pause. “‘Halle Berry Is Not a Victim of Failed Relationships.’” Longer pause. “‘Halle Berry Never Said It’s Anyone Else’s Fault.’”
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Accountability is a banner issue for Berry. She remembers exactly who taught her to take responsibility for her actions: She was in fourth grade at the time and had just moved from a city school with a mostly Black student body to an all-white school in the Cleveland suburbs. “I had a teacher, Yvonne Sims — she’s still a close friend and the godmother to both of my kids — who was one of the only two Black teachers at the school,” Berry says. “She got me to understand early on that nothing happens to you; it happens with you. If you don’t accept responsibility for your part, you will make the same mistake again and again … until you do.” At the time, Berry was living with her white mom, who raised her and her older sister. Her father, who is Black, left when she was 4 years old.
It was also that elementary-school teacher who taught her to embrace her Black culture and love her brown skin. Up until then, Berry lamented her looks: “Every little girl wants to be like her mother, you know, but my mom had blonde hair and blue eyes. I would put a yellow bath towel on my head just to look like her. I struggled.” Still, Berry’s preternatural beauty did not go unnoticed. She was voted prom queen at her high school, though the faculty accused her of stuffing the ballots and forced her to toss a coin against a white student to decide who would reign. Inwardly, she raged. “As a Black girl, I was not the symbol of who they wanted for their queen,” she says. She realized that the only way to overcome injustice was to square up against it. “Another thing nobody really gets about me is that I’ve been a fighter my whole life — fighting to be seen for who I really am, fighting to be taken seriously as an artist, fighting the stigma of beauty.”
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Overcoming assumptions based on her genetic bounty has been a lifelong plight — which, to be fair, doesn’t easily evoke sympathy. But since the beginning of her career, she’s resolved to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress. Berry landed her first movie role in Spike Lee’s 1991 film, Jungle Fever, at 25. “He wanted me to play his pretty wife, but I had been studying to be an actor. I didn’t want to be the gorgeous girl. I wanted to play the crackhead.” Lee couldn’t see it. Undeterred, she ran to the bathroom to wash off her makeup and returned to the audition room to shatter Lee’s perception of her. She got the breakout part of frazzled drug fiend Vivian alongside Samuel L. Jackson and didn’t shower or brush her teeth on set for ten days.
Since Berry’s career started taking off in the ’90s, her roles have been wide-ranging, from romantic lead (she played a “girl next door” type caught in a love triangle with Eddie Murphy in Boomerang) to camp comedy (she delivered a flamboyant performance in Robert Townsend’s B.A.P.S. and originated a character created for the live-action adaptation of The Flintstones). She nabbed an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her role as 1950s Hollywood actress and singer Dorothy Dandridge in 1999, and the scene from Die Another Day where she sashays out of the ocean as Bond girl Jinx in an orange bikini, knife belted at her hip, has graced many a mood board. Perhaps her most universally celebrated performance, though, was the one she gave in Monster’s Ball, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar at the age of 35.
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Winning the trophy was a career highlight, but “that Oscar 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 says. “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 once told three-time Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, “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?”
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For Berry, that validation has to come from within. She can laugh at herself, too. In 2005, she won the Worst Actress Razzie Award for her melodramatic portrayal of a feline supervillain in Catwoman. She showed up to the live ceremony and parodied her teary reaction to winning an Academy Award three years earlier — “I’d like to thank Warner Bros. for making me do this god-awful, piece of shit movie” — carrying her Oscar onstage. “I’ve always known that Oscar didn’t make me the best, just like that Razzie doesn’t make me the worst,” she says.
To date, Berry has appeared in 45 feature films, including four X-Men movies and 2021’s Bruised, a drama she directed and starred in about a washed-up mixed-martial-arts fighter hungry for a comeback. She’s also been name-checked in 20 rap songs by everyone from Notorious B.I.G. to Cardi B to Kendrick Lamar. Layton tells me he thinks she’s underrated: “She’s one of the great actors of her generation, even if she hasn’t always had roles like Monster’s Ball that show off what she’s capable of.” Berry’s own attitude toward her acting career these days is both grateful and goal-oriented. “As a Black woman, now almost 60, I still get to work in movies and do what I love,” she says. “I’m winning.”
She’s also been focused on her menopause-care company, Respin. “It’s a start-up, so it’s mostly me hemorrhaging my time and my money,” she says. “But women are as confused as I am on this midlife journey and I felt like I had to do something.” Her interest started when she was misdiagnosed with herpes after waking up in excruciating UTI-from-hell-like pain after sex with Hunt. “We were in the best relationship. Finally, I got it right after three divorces and one baby daddy. I found my person. Then, this.” Seventy-two hours later, she found out from her M.D. that it wasn’t an STD; it was a lack of estrogen causing vaginal atrophy. She’s gone on to tell that story on the Today show and The Drew Barrymore Show with Hunt at her side. I ask her how her team felt about her broadcasting her age and menopause journey. She admits they worried it might hurt her career. “My first reaction was, But as a Black woman, it’s always been an uphill battle, right? I had no fear. Bring. It. On.” She’s involved in the day-to-day at Respin. “Being an entrepreneur is really hard. There’s a different decorum and energy in the business world. You have a board. It’s been a learning curve for me,” she says.
In November, she co-wrote an opinion piece in Time magazine criticizing California governor Gavin Newsom for vetoing the Menopause Care Act, a bipartisan bill designed to secure insurance coverage for proven treatments. Then, in December, she doubled down by scorching Newsom at a New York Times “DealBook” summit — even calling out his credibility as a future presidential candidate. “The way he’s overlooked women, half the population, by devaluing us in midlife, he probably should not be our next president either. Just saying,” she announced onstage moments before he was scheduled to speak. Newsom responded through TMZ at an airport the next day: “We’re reconciling this.” But over a month later, he still has not reached out as promised. “It’s disturbing when people say they’re going to do things and then they don’t,” Berry tells me. “But he heard what I said. If he is going to run to be our next president, he can’t sleep on women. Wake up, Gavin.”
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No matter what the future holds, Berry intends to keep stretching as an actor, activist, and woman. She says she had a spiritual awakening in her 50s. Before she met Hunt, she’d spent four years on a healing sabbatical from romance that included a wellness retreat in India and a lot of therapy. “That’s when I realized I was just pulling in mirror images of myself — people who were broken, people with childhood wounds that weren’t addressed,” she says. Berry has publicly spoken in the past about how her late father was an alcoholic and abusive to his family. “I had to face the pain of what happened to me as a kid and release my secrets. I had to get it out of my body so I could fully love myself and show up for my own children. I cried many a night,” she says through tears. It turned out Hunt, too, had taken a two year-hiatus from relationships. “He was on his own self-discovery journey,” Berry says.
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This past June, Hunt proposed. And? She leans in. “I haven’t said ‘yes.’ I don’t think we need to be married to have a meaningful relationship. I don’t know if we will ever get married,” she adds, citing “health reasons,” or the access and right to make crucial medical decisions as a legal spouse, as one of her exceptions to the rule.
Berry is interested in the complexities of being a woman in midlife. “I’ve always wanted to play Angela Davis,” she tells me. “Growing up during that time of civil rights, my mother was very involved as a white woman with two little Black kids. That was something that was talked about a lot in our world, in our home: not being silent and fighting.” This year, Berry will produce three series and seven movies and is set to star in all of them. One of those films is Fleur, written and directed by Cameroonian American filmmaker Ellie Foumbi, about a New York housewife in a loveless marriage who realizes she devoted decades of her life entirely to her husband and kids. “She has played the doormat and wakes up one morning and thinks, Fuck, what am I doing here?” So she heads to Paris to reinvent herself as an elite escort and dominatrix. It’s all part of Berry’s modus operandi these days: “I want to do things that excite me, scare me a little.”
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Production Credits
- Photography by Renell Medrano
- Styling by Jess Willis
- Lighting Director Eduardo Silva
- Photo Assistant Keith Bennett
- Hair by Renato Campora
- Makeup by Kara Yoshimoto Bua
- Manicure by Kim Truong
- Styling Assistants: Brandon Michael and Austin Manigo
- Props Stylist James Rene
- Tailoring by Irina Tshartaryan
- Production by Kindly Productions
- Production Assistants Ashton Wilson and Alexis Van Eyken
- The Cut, Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples
- The Cut, Photo Director Noelle Lacombe
- The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor Brooke Marine
- The Cut, Photo Editor Sofía Mareque
- The Cut, Fashion Market Editor Emma Oleck
