Halle Berry has opened up about why her James Bond spin-off film was cancelled.
After the actor starred in Die Another Day (2002) as the iconic Bond girl and NSA agent Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson, MGM reportedly considered making a spin-off movie focused on Jinx. However, the idea never came to fruition.
Berry told Digital Spy, “It was very disappointing. 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,” she said.
The 54-year-old instead went on to portray DC Comics’ Catwoman. “Because I didn’t do Jinx, I thought, ‘This is a great chance for a woman of colour to be a superhero,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I try this?”
Catwoman, however, was not well received. The 2004 movie achieved only a nine per cent rating on the film review website Rotten Tomatoes.
Berry said of the film’s failure, “The story didn’t feel quite right. I remember having that argument: ‘Why can’t Catwoman save the world like Batman and Superman do? Why is she just saving women from a face cream that cracks their face-off?
“But I was just the actor for hire. I wasn’t the director. I had very little say over that.”
The X-Men star has also recently spoken about the disappointment that followed her landmark Oscar win in 2001, saddened that in the 19 years since, there has been no other black woman to have won the award.
