Halle Berry says Oscar win didn’t change career: ‘I was still Black the next morning’

Halle Berry has reflected on her 2002 Oscar win, admitting that making history as the first Black woman to win Best Actress “didn’t necessarily change the course of my career”.

Berry won the Academy Award for her role as grieving widow Leticia Musgrove in the drama Monster’s Ball and remains the only Black woman to triumph in the category.

In a new interview, the 59-year-old candidly reflects on the win, telling The Cut: “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,” she continued. “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.”

A handful of Black stars have since been nominated in the Best Actress category, including Cynthia Erivo, who made the shortlist in 2020, for her portrayal of activist Harriet Tubman, and last year, for the first Wicked movie.

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Berry revealed she told Erivo, who was also nominated for Best Original Song in 2020: “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?”

Her comments come after Lupita Nyong’o said her 2014 Best Supporting Actress win for 12 Years a Slave failed to result in a diverse range of offers.

“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’,” she said. Instead, Nyong’o said she was told: “Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship.”

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“Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award,” she explained to CNN.

Berry is currently on the promo trail for her latest movie Crime 101, which follows an elusive thief (Chris Hemsworth) whose path crosses with that of a disillusioned insurance broker (Berry).

When asked what drew her to the role, Berry told The Independent last week: "I've been fighting in my personal life to be seen and heard and not marginalised at this time, so I relate [to] it deeply.

"These characters had something social to say that I think is very important, especially right now.”