Halle Berry makes her directorial debut with Bruised this fall, and the actress recently revealed just how far she was willing to go to ensure her labor of love crossed the finish line.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Berry explained she broke two ribs on the first day of filming. She quickly added they weren’t the same ribs she fractured when filming 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.
“When you break something, it calcifies and it’s stronger. You don’t usually break the same bones twice,” Berry said. She explained that she chose to work through the pain because, during Parabellum, her injury caused production to come to a standstill.
“I told the director about it, they told the insurance. We had to shut down for months and it was a big ordeal,” the 54-year-old actress recalled. “On this, 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.'”
Eric Brown, who worked as the stunt coordinator for Bruised, was impressed by Berry’s determination.
“[It was] kind of a crazy injury. But that was just her intensity,” said Brown. “Halle’s a special case. I’ve worked with tons of actors, and almost none of them have that kind of work ethic.”
Bruised, a sports drama in which Berry plays a disgraced MMA fighter on a path to redemption, premieres November 24 on Netflix.
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