Halle Berry Once Felt Making ‘Frankie & Alice’ Was Like Giving Birth to a Baby
Halle Berry could still sometimes find it hard to get her passion projects made even after winning her Oscar. One such project took Berry years to finally release in theaters.
Halle Berry wouldn’t give up on ‘Frankie & Alice’
Frankie & Alice finally made it to the big screen after a decade-long journey. The 2010 feature was based on a real-life story, and saw Berry playing a stripper with multiple personalities. In a resurfaced interview with Essence, Berry confided that she was so inspired by the source material that she couldn’t let it go. Even though there were times when it didn’t seem the film might ever come to fruition.
“For this woman to have survived this, and not just survived it, but she is now teaching at one of the most reputable universities in the country—she’s revered,” Berry said. “She has found a way to live with this disorder, and not only live, but thrive. I thought it was a great testament to her character, to overcoming mental illness, and at the end of the day, it was inspiring and I wanted to be apart of bringing a story like this to the screen.”
After Berry was finally able to realize the project, she compared the results to the joys of childbirth.
“It’s like birthing a baby that you’ve carried for five years and it feels really good,” she said. “It’s something I care deeply about and I worked really hard on it. It’s the first film I ever produced, so for all those reasons it’s truly a passion. And now that it’s not going to sit on a shelf, it’s going to see the light of day? I’m over the moon.”
Halle Berry thought winning an Oscar would’ve helped ‘Frankie & Alice’ develop faster
Berry had been attached to star in the drama since the 90s. Although the X-Men actor was on the rise back then, she didn’t have enough status to do some of the films she wanted to make. She once reflected on these experiences in a 2010 interview with The Wrap.
“There’ve been roles that I’ve really wanted to play and I’ve had to listen to producers say to me, ‘We don’t want to go black with the role because if we go black it changes the whole story because who would her parents be? Then we got to cast a black guy for the father,’” Berry remembered. “‘Then it becomes a black movie and then who’s going to see it?’”
But Berry thought that might change after becoming an A-list star and winning an Academy Award. However, that didn’t help the process at all.
“But winning did energize me to keep fighting for this because if I could win the Academy Award, which I never thought I would do in my lifetime, I thought surely I can make this movie,” she said.
Through her growing connections in the film industry, Berry would allocate enough resources for Frankie & Alice to finally see the light of day. The process showed that Berry’s efforts in Hollywood, at least when it came to Frankie & Alice’s development, weren’t in vain.
How Halle Berry played multiple personalities in ‘Frankie & Alice’
Berry had never done a role quite like Frankie & Alice before. Given her passion for the story , she wanted to leave no stone unturned when it came to getting into character. A process she was known to indulge in for movies like Jungle Fever and others. Berry learned as much about Dissociative Identity Disorder as possible, studying real people who lived with this condition.
“I prepared each character as if they were all different,” Berry said. “I also watched hours and hours of video of real people who suffer from this disorder. I watched them go in and out of character, and I read a lot on the subject to understand how they got triggered and switch from character to character. The single most important thing that I learned was that many of them go in and out of characters because each one is fighting to get to be the one who lives. This leaves Frankie with a constant struggle going on inside. So that’s where the work started for me, figuring out how that happens.”
