A New Level of Comfort

NEW YORK — Other people's opinions: Actress Halle Berry doesn't live for them anymore.

And that, in a nutshell, is the answer to the nudity question.

Berry is ensconced in a room in the fashion-forward Time Hotel in midtown Manhattan, here to talk about "Monster's Ball," a tough film about the unexpected relationship between a racist death row prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and the widow of one of the black men he has helped execute.

There's plenty to discuss about this brooding, provocative film--but Berry finds that all anyone (read: reporters) wants to talk about is the film's steamy, progressively undressed love scene she plays with Thornton in the film. Or her 42-second (according to a Web site that measures such things) topless shot in last year's "Swordfish." Or the fact that, after a decade in the movies, she chose to take off her clothes at all.

"There are a lot of issues people are not asking about," she says of the press' fascination with her nude scenes.

On an unseasonably warm December day in Manhattan, Berry is a vision in a bone-colored knit dress--but one gets the feeling she'd be a vision in a sweatsuit after a 5-mile run. Her looks, she maintains, are exactly the thing that have stood in her way of playing roles such as Leticia Musgrove in "Monster's Ball," a part she had to fight to get.

In a sense, Berry has battled what she calls "the model image" right from the start of her career, when she convinced Spike Lee she could play a crack addict in "Jungle Fever" and again when she won the right to play a woman who aged into her senior years in Alex Haley's "Queen." But despite well-regarded acting turns in "Losing Isaiah" and "Bulworth," she still struggles against the perception that she's too beautiful to play a troubled character.

"That's the thing I run up against: She's too pretty, she's the face of Revlon," says Berry, 33, who won the Miss Teen All-American Pageant in 1985, representing Ohio from her native Cleveland. "People think that if you look this way, you can't be downtrodden. They have this stereotyped image--and it's nice to challenge stereotypes. I've had my fair share of ups and downs."

The daughter of an African American father and a white mother who divorced when she was 4, Berry battled for this role in a story about the ways racial hatred is passed down from generation to generation--and the ways it can be overcome.