For her directorial debut, Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry has dived into the world of mixed martial arts with a film that features UFC women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko.
It’s called “Bruised,” and Berry also stars as the main character in the film, Jackie “Justice.” What’s it about?
“It’s a movie about sort of a disgraced MMA fighter sort of in the middle towards the end of her career, and it’s sort of the journey she goes through to get her son back that she left when he was very young, and then get her sense of self and her career back,” Berry said Tuesday night while appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. “It’s a movie that got sat down in my lap three years ago, and it’s one of those stories that just gripped me. I understood the depth of this woman’s pain. I understood what she was fighting for. It’s very redemptive.”
It wasn’t Berry’s intention to both star and direct the film, but she assumed the latter role after nobody else connected with the story the way she did.
“I got to rewrite the movie and set it in a world that I understood for a woman my age,” Berry said. “It was originally written for a white, Irish Catholic girl in her early 20s, and so I got to re-imagine it for someone like me. It was fun.”
Not so fun perhaps? Shooting scenes with Shevchenko. The UFC champ plays the part of the main rival to Berry’s character. Things got pretty real on set, something Berry appreciated.
“I broke some stuff on this one,” Berry said. “And you know what? It’s OK. I always get hurt, but I realized that, when you go hard, you’re bound to get hurt. When you do your own stunts, you’re bound to get hurt.
“In this movie, I was fighting the real UFC flyweight champion, Valentina Shevchenko. And you know what? She had to throw some real kicks, and I had to really take them, and that really broke some bones. She’s a beast, but I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher, a better scene mate, a better fight partner. She just brought so much reality to it for me. At times, I felt like I was really fighting. Like, our referee that was in the movie is a real referee, and he says a couple times, ‘Man, I thought I was watching a real fight’ because she brought so much power and authenticity to our fight scenes.”
As if we couldn’t love Halle Berry and Valentina Shevchenko even more than we already do.
(UFC Fight Pass screen grab)
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Halle Berry really took Valentina Shevchenko's kicks while filming MMA movie – and paid for it
