In a recent interview with The Cut ahead of the release of her new thriller Crime 101, Halle Berry revealed that she once advised Cynthia Erivo not to focus too much on winning an Oscar. Erivo has been nominated twice for Best Actress (Harriet and Wicked), and Berry made history as the first black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Monster’s Ball. She remains the only black winner in this category to this day.
“The Oscar didn’t necessarily change the course of my career,” Berry told the magazine. “After I won the award, I thought a script truck was going to show up outside my door. I was so proud of it, but the next morning I was still black. Directors were still saying, ‘If we cast a black woman in this role, what does that mean for the whole story? Do we need to cast a black man? Then it’s a black movie. Black movies don’t sell overseas.'”
Years later, when Erivo’s acting career took off with an Oscar nomination, Berry told her co-star, “You deserve it, but I don’t know if it’s going to change your life. It doesn’t validate what you’re doing, does it?”
Berry has often expressed disappointment that his historic Oscar win didn’t have an impact on both his career and the industry as a whole. She told Marie Claire in 2024, “I’m forever angry that no black woman has come after me for the Best Actress Oscar. I continue to feel sad about that every year. And it’s never because there’s no one else who deserves it.” In fact, Michelle Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the only woman of color to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Speaking to Variety in 2020, Berry cited Erivo in Harriet and Ruth Negga in Loving as Oscar-worthy performances by black women. She later added Andra Day from The United States vs. Billie Holiday and Viola Davis from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the list.
“Obviously, I thought there were women who could and should do that. I wish that were the case, but I don’t have an answer as to why it didn’t happen,” Berry told Variety at the time, noting that her win remains “one of my biggest heartbreaks” because the Oscars didn’t open the door for more Black women.
“The next morning I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open the door.’ And the fact that no one was there…I wondered, ‘Was that a big moment or was it just a big moment for me?'” Berry said. “I wanted to believe it was so much bigger than me. It felt so much bigger than me, mainly because I knew that other people should have been there before me, but they weren’t…Just because you win an award doesn’t mean you’ll magically have a place the next day. I just kept paving a path where there was no path.”
Visit The Cut’s website to read Berry’s latest profile in full.
