Halle Berry Had to Break Her Child Co-Star for Never Let Go’s Painful Dog Scene
This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground up throughout the festival.
One of the most charged scenes in Alexandre Aja’s horror film Never let go puts a beloved family dog on the chopping block. A single mother (Halle Berry, billed as “Mama”) raises twins alone in the woods after what appears to be an apocalyptic supernatural event. They’ve survived together for a decade, despite a murderous stalking force they call “Evil.” But a particularly harsh winter has left them starving, to the point where they’ve turned to bark for food. Mama tells the boys, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), that they’ll have to eat their dog. Events escalate rapidly from there. It’s a tough scene to watch—and, according to Barry, so tough to film that the production kept putting it off to deal with it.
“Filming that scene was, I think, emotionally difficult for all of us,” Berry said during a Q&A after the screening at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. “It kept getting pushed back and forth because I don’t think any of us really wanted to do that scene. We knew how emotional it would be. We knew what it would feel like, and we didn’t want to do it.”
Berry says one reason the sequence was difficult to handle was that Aja in particular is a dog lover who kept his dog Peanut in his coat during production. Another reason, though, was that Daggs was struggling with the emotions. So Berry himself stepped in — aggressively.
“Our young actors were always perfect, they were the best prepared,” she said. “They worked hard, they had an acting coach. They were on time. They were great. They’re some of the best acting partners I’ve ever had, if I’m honest. But on this day, for whatever reason, our young Percy Daggs had a bit of a block. I think it was probably because he didn’t want to deal with the dog. (…) He knew he had to cry, and when someone in a script tells him to cry, they suddenly go dry. You’re not allowed to cry. That’s the worst thing you can tell an actor: This is the moment when you cry.
“So I think he was totally locked up, and we all had our feelings about the dog, and it wasn’t working,” Berry said. “I thought, Oh, this is all going to be crap if we don’t get this scene right. We hadn’t done the crucial scene of our movie, and it all fell apart. And I talked to Alex about it, and I said, Okay, this isn’t going anywhere. Percy isn’t ready for this yet.“
Berry’s solution was to improvise: “I decided to (suddenly scream) something! To, like, (scream) shake him up! Right? I decided to stand up and do something that wasn’t in the script and get him out of his head, out of his fear, out of the dog thing. (…) Everyone just went with it, and Percy’s tears started flowing, and he started connecting with his dog, and Anthony was sitting there with his beautiful, big, saucer eyes, and he just sat there and stayed in the scene. And we got to capture that moment on film. It was just one of those moments that you hope as an actor happens once in a movie, where you have a real moment when it’s alive.
Berry said the scene where she got angry at Daggs ended up in the film: “Right after we tried and tried and got nowhere, we got magic in a bottle.”
“And we knew it was the key scene that really brought that whole relationship to its peak,” Aja said. “And it was so important (…) I was really grateful.”
Spoiler, for those wondering: The dog doesn’t die, but the conflict brings something much worse to the family. Aja and Berry both laughed wryly at that.
“I wouldn’t be able to work in the US anymore,” Aja said. “I would have been deported.”
“We could never kill a dog,” Berry said, laughing. “I mean, here’s the irony: You can kill people. Who cares? But you can’t killing animals (in a movie).”
Never let go is now playing in theaters.