Halle Berry collaborated with Pierce Brosnan on the James Bond feature Die Another Day. While filming, Berry joked that there were a few scenes she shot with Brosnan she felt humiliated by.
Halle Berry experienced 2 embarrassing moments while working alongside Pierce Brosnan
Berry etched herself in Bond mythology by playing the Bond girl Jinx in Die Another Day. She wasn’t in the film just to be a love interest, however, and found herself being just as physical as Brosnan’s Bond. Although she held her own on-screen, behind the scenes there were two moments that didn’t go the way she might’ve wanted. In one take, Brosnan and Berry are making out with each other. But Berry famously began to choke during the sequence.
“We were doing the love scene and I was trying to be way too sexy for my own good, obviously,” Berry remembered according to UPI. “And something got stuck in my throat and I wasn’t getting any air in or out and Pierce said that he always knew that if someone wasn’t coughing they were really choking. And he just right away jumped up in back of me, did something, and out the thing came.”
Her second embarrassing moment came when Berry felt outclassed by Brosnan during an action scene.
“And not being able to keep up with Pierce as he was running – I swear like lightning – along with this aeroplane. I thought I saw smoke coming out of his shoes,” she once told BBC.
Halle Berry gained a lot of respect for Pierce Brosnan doing ‘Die Another Day’
As much as she enjoyed the work in Die Another Day, being an action hero wasn’t easy. She’d been in blockbuster roles before. Prior to her role as Jinx, she was known for playing the mutant Storm in X-Men. But Berry found playing a Bond girl a lot harder than playing an all-powerful superhero.
“As Storm, I control the weather. She stands, rises her arms and her eyes go white. As Jinx, I had to fight with knifes, repel from ceilings, and run after moving airplanes and jump in and out of holes that I’m really not good at chin-ups and pull-ups and I realized that’s the kind of thing one has to start to work on before beginning a movie like this,” she said.
But Berry’s experience made Brosnan’s own performance that much more impressive for the Oscar winner.
“No, I didn’t damage anything, luckily, but it is the most physical film I’ve ever taken part in,” she said. “I have a much greater respect for what Pierce has to do, because he did far more than I had to do, and he did it with so much ease and grace. It made me realize that if I do venture into another movie like this, I will spend much more time getting prepared, and maybe next time I will be able to keep up with the plane and with Pierce.”
Halle Berry initially found playing a Bond girl ‘daunting’
Being a part of Bond history was as intriguing as it was intimidating for Berry. She’d be succeeding many iconic actors in the role, and was nervous about letting down her predecessors.
“Initially it was very daunting. I mean, who really wants to be compared directly to another actress or human being? So taking on the challenge of recreating a moment that has really gone down in Bond history, knowing I would be compared to another woman, was a little bit daunting, and I hoped that I could just do it justice,” she said.
But what further lured Berry to the role was just how unique it was compared to Bond girls of the past.
“I was really excited about Bond because that’s a franchise that’s iconic. It’s a part of film history, really, so to be a part of that franchise was very meaningful to me,” she once told Collider. “And this version of a Bond woman was very different than any Bond woman I had seen before. When Barbara Broccoli came to me with the role, she explained that I would get to be a different kind – a new kind – of Bond girl. Which would allow me to be more active and sort of be… working alongside Bond in a new way, and that really excited me.”
