(Credit: Alamy)
Mon 30 June 2025 0:30, UK
Halle Berry‘s tenure as a movie star hasn’t been smooth sailing. Sure, she made history when she won the Oscar for Monster’s Ball in 2002 and attained an undying legacy when she appeared as a Bond girl in Die Another Day that same year, but she also made history for the catastrophic failure that was the Catwoman movie in 2004. She’s taken it all in her stride, though, and even had the good grace and humour to accept her Razzie in person while holding her Oscar. A peak pop culture moment.
Even before these points on the rollercoaster, Berry had her fair share of challenges in Hollywood. Some challenges were big, like the box office losses from Catwoman, and others were very, very small, like the single line of dialogue in 2000’s X-Men that is still infamously silly. In one scene, Berry, who plays the weather-controlling mutant named Storm, murders the villain Toad (Ray Park) with a bolt of lightning. First, she utters the immortal line, “Do you know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.”
This line was written by Joss Whedon, the writer and director behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who went on to shepherd the Avengers franchise to billions in box office returns. He regrets writing it, but wants to make it absolutely clear that he still takes no responsibility for how dumb it is. For that, he blames Berry.
In a 2013 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Whedon explained that he had intended the line to be delivered casually. “It was supposed to be like a throwaway,” he said, “And she did it like she was King Lear. I was trying to explain what I had written versus the actor who played it. But all people remember is you’re the one who wrote that terrible line. I should have never told that story.”
This version of events belies the easily acquired evidence. Berry does exactly what he says he wanted. She says the line calmly, with almost no intonation. She tosses it off. The fact that it became infamous is because it’s a cheesy line, for which he, as the writer, is responsible. Case closed.
It’s a bit of a dick move for Whedon to use Berry as a scapegoat, but it’s nothing new. The filmmaker has been accused of workplace harassment by multiple actors, including Justice League star Ray Fisher, who called his behaviour “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.”
True to form, Whedon turned around and called Fisher “a bad actor in both senses.”
The fact that he blamed Berry for a line he wrote is probably one of the least underhanded ways he’s treated an actor, but then again, he didn’t have much power on that particular production. Unfortunately, the person who did was director Bryan Singer, who was later accused of tyrannical on-set behaviour and casting actors (some of whom were minors) in small roles in exchange for sexual favours. In other words, that lightning-Toad line was one of the least regrettable things about the whole production, and Whedon shouldn’t be complaining about it.
Related Topics