Halle Berry Broke Two Ribs on the 1st Day Filming Her Directorial Debut Bruised—and Didn't Stop Production

Halle Berrrrrrehhhh, Halle Berreh…is a badass.

Halle Berry is a badass for many reasons—two of which are: She will be presenting her directorial debut to the whole world this winter (coming to Netflix on Nov. 24) and she is willing to go above and beyond physically on set…all while looking like this:

That directorial debut is Bruised, which made its world premiere at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and Halle recently chatted with Entertainment Weekly about it for a cover story.

“It used to be when you were 40 your career was done, and I mean really done,” she said. “Or you had to wait until you were old enough to play a grandma, and then you could have another bite at the apple, right? I mean, I couldn’t think that I’d be playing an MMA fighter at 54 years old. Yet I did, so it’s got to be changing. I’m proof of that.”

It’s currently Leo Season (*roars in solidarity*) so it’s absolutely fitting that I hype up Halle for this—and mention that her 55th birthday is coming up on Aug. 14!

Halle is proof of the power of perseverance as well, because while filming the upcoming flick, she broke two ribs on the first day of shooting…yet still continued with production. She reflected on the time she also broke some ribs (not the same pair, mind you) on the set of John Wick 3.

“I told the director about it, they told the insurance [company]. We had to shut down for months and it was a big ordeal,” she recalled about Wick. “On this [film, Bruised], because it was an independent movie, we didn’t have a big budget. The director in me said, ‘I didn’t come this far and work this hard to go home.’”

Speaking of coming quite far, it’s (notably) been 20 years since she won her Best Actress Oscar for her stint in Monster’s Ball. No Black actress has won the same trophy since, a disappointment which Halle has spoken about openly. In this recent interview, she reflected on how shocked she was that she wasn’t swamped with role offers following the historic win.

“It was surprising,” Halle recounted. “Because I thought they were going to just back up the truck and drop them off at my house, right? When you have a historic win like that, you think, ‘Oh, this is going to fundamentally change.’ It did fundamentally change me, but it didn’t change my place in the business overnight. I still had to go back to work. I still had to try to fight to make a way out of no way.”

Overall, Halle has a great outlook on her career’s past, present and future (she even laughed about how the critically-panned Catwoman was “one of the biggest paydays” of her life) and she is hella fun to follow on social media.

Like the song says, Halle Berry, Halle Berry…she’s fine.