Halle Berry is a mother to two small children—Nahla, 6, and Maceo, 8 months—and will be the first to admit that her new TV show, CBS' Extant (premiering tonight), is an ideal gig for any mom who wants to tuck in her little ones at night.
"My days of being a traveling gypsy have come to an end," Berry tells us with a soft laugh. "It's nice to work in a city where my daughter goes to school, and to have her keep her consistency, and not to be in another state working and having to skype...There are many benefits to what I'm doing now, for my family."
But don't you dare start thinking her kiddos are the only reason she's making the move!
Turns out, A-list movie star Halle Berry is a big defender of TV—and refuses to let anyone tell her it's a lesser medium.
"Some of the best projects are on television these days," the 47-year-old actress insists, adding this little statement that will serve as sweet music to any TV fan's ears: "TV is much more interesting in some ways than film now! You know, not to knock film. Because film will always be film. But the quality of television has changed over the years."
Anyone who's been paying attention to the flood of actors switching over to television—Matthew McConaughey, Kevin Spacey, Jessica Lange, Robin Williams, just to name a few—knows Berry isn't alone in her thinking, and she describes it as a concrete shift within the mindset of the acting community.
"That day of ‘I only do movies and I only do film'…Those days are gone," Berry contends. "It's now all a shade of grey. We go where the good material is, and if you do movies, you're no longer looked down upon if you do a television show. Because TV is so good. And I love that, because that just gives more opportunity for everybody to work in and out of both of the mediums interchangeably. More chances for us to do good work."
And more chances for fans to crack out on good TV. Like Berry's new event series Extant, which she describes as a "soft sci fi" and a "Hitchcockian mysterry at the end of the day." She plays shockingly knocked-up astronaut Molly Woods, opposite ER's Goran Visjnic.
Of course, there's another reason A-list movie stars are coming to TV: Shorter contracts. "I knew that it would be this amount of time in my life and that would be it," Berry explains. "And that was very appealing."
She's signed on for one season of 13 episodes—instead of the standard seven. But is there a chance she'd do a second season, assuming the series gets picked up?
"That would mean that people responded well to it," Berry responds, "and they liked it. And so for that reason, I would want to keep doing it...And so, yes I would probably try to find a way to keep doing it, for sure."