Sometimes that magic moment in front of the camera just doesn’t go as planned. In the best of cases, you can get some gold out of the moment and it stays in the film. The worst case scenarios usually don’t wind up in the final cut, which is a point that also stands in the story of how Halle Berry almost choked during her sex scene in 2002’s Die Another Day, and she was thankfully saved by Pierce Brosnan.
As Halle Berry spoke during an interview with The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Berry was asked if there was ever a stunt she was embarrassed to have flubbed on a set. Which, in turn, led to the following story being shared on broadcast TV:
I am supposed to be trying to be all sexy with a fig — and then I end up choking on it. And he had to get up and do the Heimlich. So not sexy, so not sexy.
In this intimate moment between Halle Berry’s Jinx and Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, the NSA agent and her British counterpart are having a witty conversation between the sheets. And just as the patented Bond Banter comes out to play, Jinx pull out a knife… with the express purpose to slice and share a fig with her bedmate.
The way that the scene actually played out in Die Another Day’s finished cut did achieve the desired effect in the end. You can check out that moment, and more specifically the fig stunt work that Halle Berry did for that scene, below:
As embarrassing as this incident may have sounded, it seems that there was nothing but respect between the Die Another Day co-stars after the fact. Halle Berry confirmed as much, as she gushed about Pierce Brosnan with the following praise:
He was there for me, and he will always be one of my favorite people in the whole world.
It seems like a good time to dive back into the Pierce Brosnan era of James Bond history, as last weekend’s Goldeneye watch party even got the man himself to comment on several crucial details of his tenure in the role.
While Jimmy Fallon was right in the fact that you don’t normally see the Heimlich Maneuver in a James Bond film, this whole story does draw an interesting parallel to an earlier, pre-Bond moment in Pierce Brosnan’s acting career.
While he never gave any of his fellow agents the Heimlich, he was on the receiving end of it in one of his most well-known film roles as Stu, the suitor to Sally Field’s Miranda, in the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire.
Pierce Brosnan has had his own story about an embarrassing moment that never made the cameras, but definitely made the history books for the James Bond series. For all we know, he told that story to Halle Berry when the cameras wrapped, and everyone was safe and sound. At least, we’d like to think that’s how things played out, if only to further confirm the chemistry between Brosnan and Berry as professionals who know how to turn on the charm.
Die Another Day is currently available for streaming on Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu; as well as all of the other Pierce Brosnan Bond films.
