Queen Latifah Was Originally Offered Halle Berry’s Oscar-Winning Role in ‘Monster’s Ball’
Halle Berry became the first Black female actor to win an Oscar for Best Actress thanks to her starring role in Monster’s Ball. But before Berry, the movie was hip hop icon Queen Latifah’s movie to take.
Halle Berry ended up starring in ‘Monster’s Ball’ after Queen Latifah was offered the part
Monster’s Ball turned out to be one of Berry’s many career highlights. But it wasn’t a film that she pursued until reading the movie’s script. Although Berry was a rising star at the time, she wasn’t who the film’s director Marc Foster originally envisioned for the role.
“I first received the script from my manager who had gotten the script from Marc Forster’s agent. She passed it onto my manager already knowing that Marc really wasn’t interested in me. But she thought I would be right for the role, and if my manager got me to read it, then maybe I would like it and I would fight for it. Which is exactly what happened,” Berry once told The Hollywood Interview.
Instead of Berry, Foster had another rising star in mind in hip hop icon Queen Latifah. Queen Latifah had already transitioned into a successful acting career at the time. She had small roles in films like Jungle Fever and Juice. Eventually, she led her own successful sitcom with Living Single which ran for five seasons in the 90s. In the 2000s, Queen Latifah nearly added Monster’s Ball to her growing roster of films, but circumstances prevented the casting from happening.
“I actually had that role before Halle. But they couldn’t set it up. It would have been me, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro,” Latifah once told The Associated Press (via Today).
Queen Latifah on whether she would’ve gone Halle Berry’s graphic love scene in ‘Monster’s Ball’
Berry would eventually secure the role after convincing Foster personally that she was right for the job.
“It was just a series of meetings and conversations and lunches and dinners, talking about it and just sort of fleshing out the character, and me trying to express how much passion I had for the project, how much I connected to her,” Berry said. “How I saw her and ultimately how I saw her living through me. And also convincing Marc that I would do all the things it called for.”
Instead of Sean Penn and Robert De Niro, the film would end up starring the late Heath Ledger and Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton would play Berry’s love interest in the film, with the two connecting for a raw and graphic love scene. Berry had no issues doing the take because of its importance to the film’s story.
“It’s like when you read a romantic comedy, you know where they’re going to end up, but it’s the journey of how they get there that makes it interesting. I kept thinking, ‘How are these two polar opposites going to come together?’ So when it did happen, it all made sense for me. I thought, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ So I knew how important that scene would be to the movie,” Berry said.
Likewise, when asked if she would’ve been willing to do what Berry did, Queen Latifah had a similar response.
“You wouldn’t take that role without knowing what was there already,” she said according to People. “It was the type of script that was written to be an Oscar winner, and that’s the only reason you would take it.”
Halle Berry thought ‘Monster’s Ball’ might end up ruining her career
After filming wrapped, Berry began to worry about the kind of impact Monster’s Ball would have on her acting future. She felt there were many aspects of the film that might have rubbed others the wrong way, including and especially her love scenes.
“I thought this was a movie that could very well end my career,” Berry once said on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. “It was a low, low budget movie, I got nothing to do it. And I had this love scene with all of this nudity. Very explicit. I thought if people don’t get it, this will be bad.”
Fortunately, the film seemed to have the exact opposite affect on its audience, and has remained one of Berry’s most coveted roles to this day.
