UFC flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko helped Halle Berry prepare for her role as an MMA fighter in the upcoming movie ‘Bruised’, but when it came to an actually fight scene between the two, ‘Bullet’ may have made it a little bit too real!
“I broke some stuff on this one,” Berry said on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “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.”
Berry also gave Fallon an outline of what the movie is all 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. 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 appears to have been a very personal movie for Berry as she also had a hand in shaping the story as well as starring in it, directing and performing her own stunts.
“I got to rewrite the movie and set it in a world that I understood for a woman my age. 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.”
