The Serious Injury Halle Berry Sustained On John Wick 3

The fountain of youth exists, and it gets funneled directly into Halle Berry's mansion in Malibu. While there's certainly no evidence to back up this claim, the only other explanation to her immortality would be a potent elixir she has shipped in from the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Most likely, though, it's just diet and exercise. 

Either way, Berry's extremely healthy lifestyle makes her recent injury all the more surprising.

In an interview with Variety, the 54-year-old actress shared that she suffered from two cracked ribs on the set of her newest film, Bruised. Ironic title aside, Berry went on to explain a similar situation that occurred while she was filming John Wick 3. For that film, she had been brought into the fold as the assassin Sofia and, like the titular star she shares the screen with, Berry did most all of her own stunts. She went through an extreme amount of training — working out twice a day for 60-to-90 minutes at a time — as well as additional training to ensure a synergistic relationship with the dogs she shared the screen with. The peak physical condition she was in during the filming made her injury all the more surprising, as it was quite serious, and was actually compounded by other underlying conditions.

When Berry's ribs were broken during the John Wick 3 incident, she had no idea how it had happened. "I thought I had bone cancer. I thought it was early osteoporosis. I couldn't understand why this was happening to me when I was really physically fit."

Eventually, she realized it probably had been caused by her diabetes — "I have a propensity to fracture bones faster than other people," she told Variety — and while that condition clearly doesn't slow her down most of the time, she was extremely concerned that her injury might cause her to be recast. Thankfully, as Berry explained in a 2019 interview, via Pop Culture, director Chad Stahelski completely understood, told her to rest up, and assured her that they'd wait for her to come back. Naturally, if there was a director who would understand an injury on set, it's one who used to be a stuntman himself, considering that this is the same guy who did Keanu's stunts through the Matrix trilogy.

Her more recent injury while filming Bruised, thankfully, wasn't so mysterious. The knee to the chest came from co-star Valentina Shevchenko, a renowned MMA fighter, whose lightest punches still come with a wallop that most bone structures can't handle. Not so thankfully, the whole situation stressful was even more stressful, because Bruised marks her first time sitting in the directing chair. Considering Berry was the first, and currently only, Black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, she understood the cultural importance of her role in directing this film, so she pushed through the pain on set: "I didn't want to stop because I had prepared for so long."

Bruised will premiere at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2020.