Halle Berry's fans always complain that she doesn't get enough to do in movies. The X-Men films barely gave her a chance to flex and thrillers like Swordfish and Executive Decision only gave her supporting roles. To make up for that, Perfect Stranger almost gives her three characters to play. There's Rowena, the reporter investigating a murder, her undercover alias and the real twist which is only revealed at the end.
Halle Berry's Spotlight in Perfect Stranger
"I love a character that gives me a chance to grow and do something different, and Row was so multifaceted," said Berry. "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 but I’m going to go down trying' because that’s how impassioned I was about it."
Rowena takes a temp job at the office of Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) because she suspects him of killing her friend. He was having an online affair and she threatened to go to Mrs. Hill. With motive, Row spies on Hill to trap him. With all the various secrets at play, the actors had to follow the script strictly lest anything fall out of logic.
"Bruce 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. It’s very hard to write for people that you don’t know and sometimes words just flow differently and so we had delivery always to change the little words, always keeping the intention of the line and of the scene the same."
Perfect Stranger
Perfect Stranger
Perfect Stranger
With Berry and Willis playing cat and mouse, the sexual tension heats up the screen. "It’s hard not to have chemistry with Bruce because he’s a ladies’ man but he’s also a man’s man. You know, men like him. He represents that you know good ‘ol macho man’s man and women find him irresistibly sexy, and he’s funny, 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. He’s got all that down. He knows how to do all of that. So it’s fun to be around Bruce."
Row has a partner, Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), who handles her tech stuff. Behind the scenes, each actor got a different side of Berry. "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 and 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 and we talked about the computers a lot and just different."
In a sexy thriller, of course Berry dresses the part and looks great. "We did have an amazing costume designer, Renee Kalfus but 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 and 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 so a big part."
Perfect Stranger opens to theatres on April 13th.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to the Perfect Stranger Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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