Halle Berry has shared that growing up as a biracial child came with its own set of challenges.
The Oscar winner recently appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, where host Conan O’Brien explored her family background, including being raised by a white mother while her Black father was absent.
“The thing about that kind of childhood was looking like me, obviously being Black, but having a white mother, all girls, kids, you want to be like your mom, right?” Berry said around the 16-minute, 40-second mark of the episode.
“But it was painfully impossible for me to be anything like my mother, right? She was blonde, blue eyes, everything I wasn’t.”
The 59-year-old explained that she felt she “could never” resemble her mom and even tried to change her appearance as a child — including wrapping a “yellow towel” around her head to imagine she “had blonde hair.”
“I felt very confused about my identity growing up. Even though we lived in an all-Black neighborhood, I still wanted to be like my mother,” Halle Berry shared. “If my mother’s white and I’m Black, what does that mean? Who am I? Am I really Black? Am I half Black? Am I mixed? Am I not mixed? I don’t feel very white. I don’t look very white, but yet I have this white mother. It’s part of me. There was a lot of confusion growing up.”
Berry said her mother eventually helped her come to terms with her identity.
“She told me, ‘You will be identified as you are. You will be perceived as Black. You are Black, and if you accept this part of you, your life will be indelibly easier,’” the actress recalled.
Halle has never shied away from conversations about race. She recently reflected on winning the 2002 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Monster’s Ball — becoming the first and still the only Black woman to receive the honor.
“That Oscar didn’t necessarily change the course of my career,” Berry told The Cut earlier this month. “After I won it, I thought there was going to be, like, a script truck showing up outside my front door. While I was wildly proud of it, I was still Black that next morning.”
She noted that the same industry hurdles remained in place.
“The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?’”
