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Halle Berry, the only black woman to have won the best actress Oscar, says her 2002 victory “didn’t necessarily change the course of my career”.
Speaking to The Cut’s Monica Corcoran Harel to promote new drama Crime 101, Berry said that she anticipated the victory, for Lee Daniels’ Monster’s Ball, would mean “there was going to be a script truck showing up outside my front door”.
Yet the number of projects she was offered remained stable because of the industry’s continued uncertainty about how to tell the stories of people of colour, said Berry.
“While I was wildly proud of it, I was still black that next morning. Directors were still saying, ‘If we put a black woman in this role, what does this mean for the whole story? Do I have to cast a black man? Then it’s a black movie. Black movies don’t sell overseas.’”
A similar sentiment was voiced by Lupita Nyong’o last year, who won the supporting actress Oscar in 2014 for her performance in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave.
Speaking to CNN, Nyong’o said the range of roles she was offered was dismayingly slim. “After I won that Academy Award, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get lead roles here and there,’” she said.
Instead, she said, the conversations usually began: “‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award.”
More than 30 black actors – including Sinners’ Michael B Jordan – have so far been nominated for the leading actor Oscar, and five have won, while 16 black women actors have been up for the equivalent best actress award.
Twenty-five male actors have competed for the supporting actor award – with seven wins – including Sinners’ Delroy Lindo. His co-star, Wunmi Mosaku, is one of 32 black female actors who have been nominated for supporting actress, with 10 wins. The favourite this year is One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor.
