Halle Berry Just Revealed Why Her ‘James Bond’ Spinoff Was Never Made
After 30 years in Hollywood, there isn’t much that Halle Berry hasn’t seen or done. Berry is still the first and only Black woman to win a Best Actress Award at the Oscars and her extensive filmography has stretched into various franchises including John Wick and X-Men.
Still, despite her mega success, as a woman of color, Berry has still faced struggles and hardship. Following her 2002 Oscars win for her starring role in Monster’s Ball, the doors didn’t exactly open for Berry. She also got into vicious fights with X-Men director, Bryan Singer on set.
However, one of Berry’s biggest disappointments was that her James Bond spinoff never came to fruition.
Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson is still seen as the best Bond Girl
In 2002, the same year she snagged her Oscar, Berry starred in Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final film as the iconic James Bond. Jinx was a legend in and of herself.
In the film, Jinx, an NSA agent, is assigned to kill the rogue North Korean agent Zao. It just so happened that Bond is also after Zao. After a bit of a romantic entanglement, the pair decided to work together as a team to bring Zao to his knees.
During an interview with Ebony Magazine at the time, Berry described Jinx as a “fashion-forward modern and the next step in the evolution of women in the Bond movies. She’s more modern and not the classic villain.”
To this day, Jinx and that iconic orange bikini are still talked about. In fact, Berry says playing Jinx kept her relevant after her Oscars win.
Halle Berry was supposed to star in a ‘James Bond’ spinoff as Jinx
Berry brought Jinx to life at a time when Black people in major Hollywood movies were few and far between. She was absolutely magnetic which made people fall in love with her.
In fact, Jinx was so popular that James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson began planning for a Jinx spinoff. It never got off the ground so instead, Berry took on Catwoman, which was widely panned. Berry told Variety that she was discouraged from taking the superhero role. She revealed,
People said to me, ‘You can’t do that. You’ve just won the Oscar.’ Because I didn’t do Jinx, I thought, ‘This is a great chance for a woman of color to be a superhero. Why wouldn’t I try this?’
This is why Halle Berry’s ‘James Bond’ movie was never made
Berry is still deeply disappointed that Jinx never happened, in the end, MGM was unwilling to greenlight the $80 million budget needed for the film. “It was very disappointing,” Berry explained to Variety. “It was ahead of its time. Nobody was ready to sink that kind of money into a Black female action star. They just weren’t sure of its value. That’s where we were then.”
However, times are changing. As Daniel Craig completes his turn as James Bond in the forthcoming No Time to Die, it looks like Lashana Lynch’s Nomi could be picking up 007’s gun.
