Halle Berry Recalls Her Showdown with Bryan Singer on X‑Men Set

Bryan Singer’s issues while working on the first two X-Men movies have been largely documented through revelations from various cast members over the years, indicating there were some tumultuous times on set with the director who first made a splash in the ’90s with the neo-noir crime thriller The Usual Suspects.

Singer hasn’t directed a movie since multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him were recounted in a report from The Atlantic in 2019, but the stars of his blockbuster X-Men franchise installments haven’t forgotten what it was like to work with him back in the day.

Halle Berry, who starred as the mutant Storm in four of Singer’s X-Men films, recently recalled a time when she finally stood up to him on set, saying she told him “just where to go and how to get there.”

“Everybody was mad, but they all said to me, ‘Halle, you go tell ’em,’ because they knew I would. And it’s one of the greatest days on a set, telling someone who was wronging the entire crew, the entire cast, exactly where to go. And then I got on a plane and flew home with my X-Men suit on,” Berry told EW, adding, “I’m sorry, that guy deserved it.”

Nightcrawler actor Alan Cumming also remembers Berry’s showdown with Singer during the filming of X2 in his autobiography Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, claiming that Singer was using painkillers and would display erratic behavior that included disappearing from the set for hours. But when Cumming, along with co-stars Berry, Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, and Famke Janssen, staged an intervention in Singer’s trailer, he reacted so badly that Berry reportedly ended up saying, “I’ve heard enough. You can kiss my black ass.”

Singer also disappeared from the set of X-Men: Apocalypse circa 2015, according to star Olivia Munn, who said that he flew out to LA to see a doctor “and was gone for about 10 days.”

“He texted to the actors, ‘Hey guys. I’m busy right now. But just go ahead and start filming without me.’ And we’d be like, ‘OK.’ And I never thought any of it was normal, but I didn’t realize that other people also thought it wasn’t normal. And the other people who thought it wasn’t normal would be people at high levels, people who make decisions on whether to hire this person,” Munn told Variety, adding, “[I’ve] come to find out it is really strange and it wasn’t OK. But this person is allowed to continue to go on. Fox still gives him Bohemian Rhapsody, and then we all know what happened.”

Fox eventually dismissed Singer from the Queen biopic during production in 2017, citing his “unexpected unavailability.” He was then replaced by Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher, who completed the film. It went on to win four Oscars at the 91st Academy Awards.