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Halle Berry Says She Wants to Play a Transgender Man in Upcoming Film


 

If you weren’t already exhausted enough, Halle Berry recently announced that she plans to play a trans male character in her next film project.

The Oscar-winning actress revealed in a Saturday conversation with hairstylist Christin Brown on Instagram Live that she intends to star as a trans man in an unnamed film project. Berry was offered the part before she started production on her directorial debut Bruised, in which she plays a disgraced MMA fighter, but with that film headed to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Berry said she hopes the project will be next in line.

“I want to experience that world, understand that world,” she said of the role. “I want to deep dive in that in the way I did Bruised.”

Berry is a talented performer, as well as the first and only Black woman to win Best Actress, but her framing of the role raises several red flags right off the bat. She misgenders the unnamed character throughout the discussion, referring to him as a “woman” and claiming the project is a “female story.”

“It’s really important to me to tell stories, and that’s a woman,” she said. “That’s a female story. It changes to a man, but I want to understand the why and how of that. I want to get into it.”

Berry also introduced the subject in light of a larger discussion about the nuances of Black hair, thus appearing to suggest that stepping into the shoes of a trans person is akin to going to the salon. “She’s a woman that transitions into a man,” Berry said, “so my hair is going to have to be really short.”

After the U.K.-based LGBTQ+ outlet PinkNews flagged the chat in a Monday story, Twitter users noted that the budding controversy is déjà vu all over again. Alex Schmider, producer of the recent Netflix documentary Disclosure on trans media representation, commented that the LGBTQ+ community has “talked and talked and talked about this issue… ad nauseam” in recent years.

“It’s past time for people to listen,” he said.

The issue of cis actors playing trans roles gained national attention in 2018 when Scarlett Johansson was met with intense backlash following the announcement of Rub and Tug, in which she was set to play a trans crime boss. Johansson initially dismissed the criticism in a statement, directing detractors to reach out to the representatives for Jared Leto and Jeffrey Tambor — cis actors who have played trans characters — for comment. However, she eventually dropped out of the film and issued an apology.



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