Cloud Atlas - Halle Berry

"It was so poignant for an actor, someone like me, to be able to shed my skin, and do something that I would never have been able to do if it weren't for this kind of an extraordinary story." 

- Halle Berry

Cloud Atlas interweaves multiple plots set across six different eras. It explores the idea that the actions of individual lives impacts one another in the past, present, and future. Halle Berry is one of the actresses for the film and she delves into six different characters. She portrays a slave for an aboriginal tribe in 1849, a white Jewish trophy wife in 1936, a journalist in the 1970s following her famous reporter father's footsteps, an Indian woman at a party in 2012, a male Korean doctor in 2144, and an advanced being in a post-apocalyptic world in 2321. It's interesting to see the progression of her character over these many eras. She goes from being someone with no power to being humanity's last hope as she follows her impulse to help others.

There are also a lot of interesting choices the director made to tie her character iterations together.
Her 1973 story is a manuscript that Jim Broadbent's character reads in the 2012 era. And if you notice, Halle Berry wears the same exact necklace for her characters in 1936, 1973, and 2012. And she states in the 1972 story: "For the last half hour, all I could think about was throwing you off your balcony" which comes from Tom Hank's character in the 2012 story. Besides the use of the same actors for different character roles, there are also other subtle inclusions to tie characters together.