Halle Berry’s fight for Storm’s emancipation from a boxed-in role is a verse hidden within the chapters of Fox’s long and dark history. Despite the allegations surrounding Bryan Singer tainting the future of the X-Men franchise, its past remains equally troubled because of the scale of its disparate and expansive universe.
But one of the constants that stayed within the majority of the Foxverse movies was its leading host of heroes comprising Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, Mystique, and Professor X. And although they have formed the basis of most of the plots, arcs, and storylines of the mutant narrative, not all played an equal part in its progression as some of their contemporaries.
Halle Berry Takes a Stand For Her Character Arc as Storm
The casting of Wolverine is a fascinating story of Hugh Jackman’s overnight rise out of relative obscurity into global fame. But the rest of his castmates remained very much a pick out of an established roster of actors, including the Oscar-winning Halle Berry as the iconic Storm. However, despite the Monster’s Ball actress’s credibility beyond the Foxverse, her presence within it was limited to hardly half an hour of screen time and barely a few lines in dialogue.
Halle Berry was one of the few outspoken ones to stand against the indifference to her role as Storm and vocally advocated to get a stronger and more essential part for her character in the movies that made her a staple in the CBM franchise.
“I think Storm does a little bit more in the comic book and the fans aren’t happy. It’s not about me having more but if I’m gonna be on for ten minutes, can I say something important for ten minutes instead of ‘Where’s the plane?’
This is all I ever wanted. Not really more screen time because I know it’s an ensemble, but if Storm spoke for 5 minutes, then I wanted it to be 5 minutes that meant something,” she said. “5 minutes of character development; 5 minutes of a point of view and 5 minutes of some back story history, not just ‘go get the plane’ or ‘come on kids, let’s go’. After three movies, I really wanted her lines to mean something.”
It is understandable how one character amidst a host of an ensemble cast can easily get lost in the broader scope of the plot. However, the ingenuity of the Marvel comics lies in bringing together all of its characters in a balanced form as opposed to bringing them all in for a showstopping climactic sequence.
Halle Berry Threatened Fox to Get a Bigger Role as Storm
Storm’s powers make the mutant quite literally a force of nature and an indispensable member of the X-Men. And Halle Berry recognized that during her tenure in the Foxverse and ensured that her character met with a more favorable treatment rather than one singular and thunderous appearance during the movie’s final battle sequence. The one assured way to make that happen was to threaten the studio with a drastic and irreversible step, even if it turned out to be a bluff.
“That’s what I threatened. But I really wasn’t going to do that, but I thought that I somehow have to scare the s*** out of them and get them to give Storm a point of view, so I really didn’t say that to the studio; I just sort of threw that around thinking that it will get some attention.”
Berry’s say did in fact matter in the end as her role as Storm turned out to be just as iconic as the rest of her Foxverse contemporaries. Despite her appearance in only four of the ten mainstream X-Men films, notwithstanding the Deadpool duology and The New Mutants, Berry’s Storm remains a highly impactful and memorable role, one that was passed on to Alexandra Shipp in X-Men: Apocalypse before Berry’s reprisal of the role in a much bigger capacity in X-Men: The Last Stand.
The X-Men films are available for streaming on Disney+
Source: Black Film
