Halle Berry and Angelina Jolie seem like a match made in Hollywood heaven, but their collaboration on the new movie Maude v Maude didn’t begin on the right note.
“We had a rocky start and I think that is going to serve us well in our screen time together,” Berry, 57, revealed at the Red Sea Film Festival on Wednesday, December 6, according to Variety. She went on to call Jolie, 48, “formidable,” adding, “[I’m] thrilled to work with another woman and craft a story with our sensibility and from our point of view.”
Berry did not specify what led to her and Jolie’s initial rift, teasing that people will have to wait to find out the truth of the “good” story. The pair eventually set aside their differences by discussing each of their romantic pasts.
“We’ve been talking a lot about divorces and exes,” the Moonfall star shared. “We bonded, let’s say that.”
Both actresses have experience handling breakups in the public eye. Berry was previously married to David Justice from 1993 to 1997, Eric Benét from 2001 to 2005 and Olivier Martinez from 2013 to 2016. She has been dating singer Van Hunt since 2020.
Jolie, meanwhile, has not publicly dated anyone since she filed for divorce from ex-husband Brad Pitt in September 2016. They tied the knot in 2014 after nine years together. In October 2022, Jolie accused Pitt, 59, of being “physically and emotionally abusive” toward her and their children during a 2016 flight from France to California, per court documents obtained by Us Weekly. (The exes share kids Maddox, 22, Pax, 20, Zahara, 18, Shiloh, 17, Knox, 15, and Vivienne, 15.)
Pitt denied the claims and was cleared of child abuse allegations by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services that November. Though the two were declared legally single in 2019, they have remained in a messy custody battle ever since. Pitt, for his part, moved on with Alia Shawkat, Nicole Poturalski and Emily Ratajkowski before sparking a romance with Ines de Ramon in late 2022.
Earlier this year, Jolie said she’s still “in transition as a person” following her split from Pitt. “I feel a bit down these days. I don’t feel like I’ve been myself for a decade, in a way, which I don’t want to get into,” she said in her November Vogue cover story, “[My family] had a lot of healing to do. We’re still finding our footing.”
Jolie and Pitt fell in love on the set of 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, one of the films, Berry said, serves as inspiration for Maude v Muade. On Wednesday, Berry described the project as a mix between the spy romance and Mission: Impossible, with a hint of comedy. In addition to starring in the film, Berry and Jolie will also serve as coproducers.
At the film festival, Berry also noted that she was using her time in Saudi Arabia to scout locations for the globetrotting picture. “We plan on going all around the world,” she teased. “Warner Bros. bought our screenplay and, for us, it is about going places that have never been shown on screen before.”
