Halle Berry Really Wants to Play Trans Man In New Project

With quarantine many celebrities have been letting things hang a little looser, doing Q&As on Instagram Live and other platforms. In a recent one, Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry hopped on with hairstylist Christin Brown for a chat about her career. While discussing Black hair and Berry's time in the James Bond 2002 film Die Another Day, Brown asked whether Berry would every consider cutting her hair as short as it had been in the film.

"Yeah," she responded. "I'm thinking of playing a character where this woman is transgender. So my hair is going to have to be -- she's a woman that transitions into a man, so my hair is going to have to be really short." While Brown listens in amazement, Berry continues, saying that the project is one she really loves.

"I might be doing it," she continues. According to Berry, the project first came to her as she was working on her directorial debut Bruised. That project was due out this year and follows Berry as a disgraced MMA fighter.

"When this was pitched to me I thought if I'm going to do another movie that's the role that I want to play," she continued of this new trans character. "I want to experience that world, I want to understand that world. I want to deep dive in the way that I did Bruised."

"Who this woman was is so interesting to me," she continued. "That will probably be my next acting project." Brown encouraged the idea "on the behalf of the community."

"That's a woman," Berry said later. "That's a female story. Yes, she transitioned into a man but I want to understand the why and the how of that. So I'm hoping that I get to do it." While we are huge fans of Berry, we have to say we hope that she doesn't get the role.

As has been explained many times before, and was illustrated beautifully and in-depth in the Netflix film Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, the story of a trans man, is not a "female story." He isn't a woman. He's a man of trans experience -- someone who was assigned female at birth but later realized that he was male. That Berry doesn't see and understand this, is one in a slew of reasons that she shouldn't play the role.

What's worse is that this isn't the first time we had this conversation -- Scarlett Johansson made international headlines over a similar casting.

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