Halle Berry stars as an investigative reporter trying to get to the truth behind her friend’s murder in Perfect Stranger, a thriller co-starring Bruce Willis and directed by James Foley. The film follows Berry as Rowena Price, a driven reporter who goes undercover to snoop on a powerful advertising executive (Willis) who was having an affair with her friend right before she turned up dead.
The Appeal of Perfect Stranger: “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 and that gave me a chance as an artist to sort of stretch my limits and to challenge myself. 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 [or] if I can, but I’m going to go down trying,’ because that’s how impassioned I was about it.”
The Twists and Turns Required Sticking to the Script: “As you may have read in the press, Bruce [Willis] likes to improv a little bit so he did a little bit of that. But for the most part, we kind of had to stick to the script. I mean everybody would come up with a line here or there. You know, just sometimes as an actor, you find that the way the writer wrote a line just doesn’t come out of your mouth right so we change it a lot, but we don’t change the intention. But we sometimes change how it comes out of our mouths. It’s very hard to write for people that you don’t know and sometimes words just flow differently. We had [discretion] always to change the little words, always keeping the intention of the line and of the scene the same.”
The Chemistry Between Berry and Willis: It works, and Berry says it wasn’t tough to find. “It’s hard not to have chemistry with Bruce because he’s a ladies man but he’s also a man’s man,” explained Berry. “You know, men like him. He represents that good ol’ macho man’s man and women find him irresistibly sexy. He’s funny [and] he’s charming. He knows how to say all the right things that just make you feel like you’re the most important person on the planet. Like he’s got all that down. He knows how to do all of that. So it’s really fun to be around Bruce.”
Berry says she had a different relationship with Willis while working on Perfect Stranger than she did with Giovanni Ribisi. “Probably because of the nature of the characters that we all played and our connection to each other. You know, my relationship with Bruce was about seducing him so our banter in-between scenes was always very seductive and silly and sexy. We just tried to stay in that mode where Giovanni and I, because he was like my Guy Friday, you know we had a more cerebral conversations all the time. We talked about the computers a lot and you know [it was] just different.”
Working with Director James Foley: “You ask anybody - and I would 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. That’s a different language, really, because actors sometimes have to hear words from an organic place, not an intellectual place. Sometimes the choices we make as actors 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. …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 [Ribisi] and we’re in that Chemley scene at the restaurant. We do the first take, and after the first take every one of us is kind of 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 [screaming], ‘Ahhh, yes!’ We’re like, ‘What the hell was that?’ And it’s James Foley and he’s like [screaming], and that was the tone that he set. 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 okay.”
On Rowena’s Wardrobe: Asked if she had a lot of input into her character’s style Berry replied, “Yes, but we did have an amazing costume designer, Renee Kalfus. But I needed… You know, on many movies for me, if I put on a certain piece of clothing then I feel like the character. I remember in Monster’s Ball when I had those flip-flops on, I was Leticia Musgrove. I had to have the flip-flops. And so there’s always one or two things that hones it in for me. This movie, there was the clothes. Every character that I played within the one character had a piece of clothing that, when I had it, I knew, ‘Okay, now I’m this character.’”
Hitting the Big 4 0: Berry recently turned 40 and the Academy Award-winning actress says reaching that milestone was a huge turning point in her life. “I would say a magical thing happened when the big 40th birthday came,” explained Berry. “It was really magical in a way for me. I felt like a light kind of just went off. Maybe because I felt like at 40, I had the right to 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 maybe it was me that felt the shift, but I do think I’ve gotten wiser and I’ve learned lots of lessons.”
Page 2: Halle Berry on Her Career, Nappily Ever After, and Things We Lost in the Fire
