MARK OLSEN: Because another theme in the film along with the fighting is this is a story of motherhood as your character Jackie sort of unexpectedly finds herself caring again for a son that she had given up.
And as a mother yourself, did you draw from personal experiences in the film? Like how did you sort of approach that theme of motherhood in the movie?
HALLE BERRY: Of course. And I think, you know, being a mother, I had a lot to draw from. I understand what motherhood is all about, but I also understood — which was also a really important thing for me for this film — I understand generational trauma.
And one of the things I discovered when I started to do my research about why women fight ... so many women fight because they’re fighting to get their power back.
They’re fighting to be heard. They’re fighting for a voice that they felt like they lost.
And as we know throughout history, women have been marginalized in many different ways and feel powerful in their body.
So I knew that this idea of generational trauma had to be a part of this story in some way. And that’s what Jackie and her mother character Angel represent for me.
MARK OLSEN: Can you tell me more about this notion of generational trauma and how you take what — in some ways — sounds like an abstract idea and sort of really try to bring it out in this very, you know, gritty rooted story about MMA fighting?
HALLE BERRY: Well, what I know about generational trauma is, you know, especially let’s take the Black community.
You think back to slavery. Women, Black women had to watch their children ripped away from them and sold off. That’s traumatizing to the mother and that’s traumatizing to the child.
I can’t imagine my children ripped from me today, sold to other states and gone into slavery. And I never see these children that I inextricably have a bond with because I carried them in my body, right?
That mother is traumatized forever and that child is traumatized. So that child then goes on and has her own children.
But now she’s operating out of place of trauma because she was never really loved and nurtured the way children need to be. So now she’s trying to mother a child, but she’s going to repeat that trauma and pass down that legacy of abuse in some ways, because that’s all she knows.
So that’s the story I was telling with the Jackie and her mother, Angel story. Angel wasn’t a bad person. She was just traumatized from her mother, who was traumatized by her mother.
And the cycle will keep continuing until somebody — and I want to hope at the end of this movie, we believe that Jackie Justice is going to break that cycle and do better.
And by confronting her mother with her trauma, by confronting her mother with the abuse in her childhood was one step towards healing and breaking the cycle. And these are things that are taboo that we don’t talk about.
But this is the female gaze that I wanted to make this movie with. It’s very female. It’s very much what we know is real for us, but we don’t often talk about it. And I wanted to talk about it.
MARK OLSEN: You’ve talked in the past about your own experiences with domestic violence. And I’m wondering how did those experiences impact the way you approach some of those scenes in the movie?
HALLE BERRY: It viscerally impacts me. I’ve seen this. I grew up with a very abusive father who was alcoholic, very much like our Desi character. I know that man. That could have been my father or my uncles. You know, I’ve seen it.
But what I also know about these people is they’re not bad people. They’re good people with bad problems. They’re hurt people. And when you live in an inner city and you don’t have access to mental health, which many people in the inner cities don’t have.
One, they can’t afford it. And two, they don’t believe in it. It’s just culturally how we’ve developed. And so you stay stuck in your dysfunction and you operate out of brokenness and out of fractured places.
And that’s what I understand about alcoholism and drug addiction and abuse and domestic violence. It’s fractured people who are trying to survive, and they just don’t have the skills. They don’t know how. And this is what it looks like.
MARK OLSEN: Your understanding of this seems so evolved. How did you sort of come to this place that you’re in now? I’m sort of wondering how you sort of worked through those experiences to sort of become the Halle Berry you are today?
HALLE BERRY: A lot of therapy, and I say that most sincerely. When I was 10 years old, my mother saw that my father had become so abusive he was beating up my sister.
He was beating up my mother. At one point he took our dog and he smashed our dog against the wall and our dog bit its tongue off. And blood was everywhere, and you couldn’t think of anything more traumatizing.
And I remember I was the kind of kid that ran in the closet and hid. And I had a lot of guilt growing up because I saw what happened to my mother and our sister and our dog, and I was spared.
But watching the abuse happen to the others, and feeling like I couldn’t do anything, or that I was afraid to do anything had me also traumatized in the same way.
So my mother at 10 years old knew that I needed to get into some therapy. I needed to talk about what I had seen. Things that, you know, 10-year-olds shouldn’t have to see. And she was worried about how it would materialize in my life and what I would become after living through these kinds of experiences.
And luckily, she had the forethought to get me some mental health so that I could process, you know, all of this that I was, being asked to experience at such a young age.