Many men over the years have fawned over Halle Berry. The model-turned-actor was a Hollywood sex symbol in the 1990s and 2000s, and in her role as the Bond Girl Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson, she turned many heads for her acting and indisputable good looks. That said, in 1998, Harlem emcee Cam’Ron (real name Cameron Giles) attempted to court the actor in Los Angeles.
During an appearance on the All The Smoke podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, Giles recalled his run-in with Berry in LA before she became the first black female to win an Oscar for Best Actress. However, he admitted she rejected him, as she was with another man then.
He began recounting the exchange the pair had by expressing his admiration for Berry, stating, “I love Halle Berry, right? So one day [when] I had [recently] gotten a record deal, I had just finished playing basketball in LA. I’m at the ATM, and n***as is like, ‘Yo, that’s Halle Berry next to you!’ I ain’t got no haircut, I got no shirt on. I’m like, ‘Yo, let me talk to you real quick!'”
Revealing that Berry almost immediately shut him down, Cam’Ron continued, “She’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. You have to relax.’ I’m like, ‘Hear me out! Hear me out.’ So she walking to her car mad fast and I’m following her. But I had a cassette tape.”
Giles laughed at how desperate he must have looked in retrospect but unveiled that, at the time, he was trying to get some promotion, adding, “My promo was [on] cassette tapes at the time before CDs came out. So I’m like, ‘At least let me just give you my tape!’ So she rolled her window down [slightly].”
However, an eager, young Cam’Ron began to realise there was a man in the car Berry had jumped out of, so he ceased the flirting and made it a purely business-centred mission, concluding, “There was a n*gga in the passenger seat, laid back. I slid the shit through there and gave her my fuckin’ promotional. It wasn’t my album—It was one of those shits where it got the snippet songs on there. So I gave her that shit!”
For years, Cam’Ron didn’t know who the man was. However, at the 2004 American Music Awards, alongside figures such as Nelly Tyson Beckford, and Larenz Tate, Tate approached Giles, exclaiming, “Yo my n*gga, I fuck with you, na. You one of my favourite for years. You know that was me in the passenger seat with Halle when you slid that joint in there.”
At the time, both Tate and Berry were filming the 1998 drama Why Do Fools Fall in Love. You can listen to Cam’Ron speaking on the All The Smoke podcast below.
