Rapper Cardi B and Oscar winner Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball) have teamed up to executive produce the all-female soundtrack for Berry’s new film Bruised, which also marks her directorial debut.
Bruised is a sports drama where Berry plays an aging mixed martial arts fighter named Jackie Justice, who returns to the octagon to go toe-to-toe with a top MMA champion in an unsanctioned match. Justice must also grapple with the fact that her 6-year-old son has come back into her life. Actor Adan Canto (X-Men: Days of Future Past) plays her boyfriend and manager.
The soundtrack for Bruised, which will be available November 19, includes original tracks by Cardi B (“Bet It”), Saweetie (“Attitude”), City Girls (“Scared”), H.E.R. (“Automatic Woman”), Flo Milli (“Blast Off”) and Latto (“Tha F**k”). H.E.R. also performs the title track to the movie.
“When I thought…‘What would be the voice that would be the pinnacle of what this soundtrack could be,’ I, of course, thought of the queen,” Berry told The Hollywood Reporter. “Who wouldn’t want to have a Cardi B song and have her voice and her talents on their debut [film]?”
From Cardi B’s perspective, she found the entire experience surreal. “I was like, ‘Oh my, gosh. Is this really happening? Is this the real Halle Berry? She knows me. She likes me. She loves me.”
Berry says one of the connections she had with Cardi B was the fact that they are both women of color who are used to having to fight to get what they want. “We’re used to fighting,” Berry said. “We’re on the bottom rung. I think fighting is somewhat second nature.”
Berry also joked that Cardi should have asked her to be in the music video for “WAP” to make a collaboration between them happen sooner. “If I could’ve been in WAP, that would’ve been great,” Berry said. “Cardi, you should’ve asked me to be in WAP.”
This week, Berry has been defending comments she made at an event where she called Cardi B the “Queen of Hip-Hop.”
“There’s room for more than one queen, people,” she recently told Jimmy Kimmel. “Nicki [Minaj] is a queen in her own right. H.E.R. is a queen. All these ladies to me are queens. There can always be more than one.”
Bruised premieres on Netflix on November 24.