Entertainment

She Had (Baby) Daddy Issues

by Marisa LaScala

When her new summertime series premieres on CBS at 9 p.m., Extant star Halle Berry will play Molly Woods, an astronaut who comes home from an extended mission — a solo mission, that is — to find out that she's mysteriously pregnant. She has to figure out how to explain her circumstances to her husband (played by Goran Visnjic) and son (Pierce Gagnon), who happens to be an A.I.

While not as fantastical as an unexplainable conception or a robot son, Berry's personal life in the couple of years leading up to Extant has also been quite dramatic. Things seemed at their worst right around Thanksgiving of 2012, when a custody dispute over her daughter, Nahla, came to blows. Berry was seeking to move to France with Nahla and her then-fiancé, actor Olivier Martinez. Even though the judge denied Berry permission to relocate her daughter, Gabriel Aubrey, Nahla's father and Berry's ex, allegedly assaulted Martinez over the incident. Aubrey didn't have to face charges, provided he remained law-abiding for a year.

It's not like her career was so hot at the time, either. Dark Tide, the 2012 movie that co-starred Berry and Martinez, was little seen (Dark Tide made only $432,274 worldwide, per Box Office Mojo) and poorly reviewed (a staggering 0 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer). Movie 43 , in which Berry has a small part, only inched the needle forward in terms of success, with a whopping 4 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The more ambitious Cloud Atlas , was better reviewed (66 percent on the Tomatometer), but sadly flopped at the box office (a gross of only $27 million).

What a difference a couple of years makes, though. Here are some ways Berry has been on the upswing in the run-up to Extant.

She Married Olivier Martinez

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Berry and Martinez married in a private ceremony in the Burgundy region of France. It also took place in a castle. Go ahead and let the jealousy sink in.

At Age 47, She Gave Birth to a Son

A human son, too — not an A.I. On October 5, 2013, she and her now husband Martinez welcomed Maceo into the world. "They call it a geriatric pregnancy," she told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show. "This is probably way TMI, but I was really, you know, kind of premenopausal, so to have this happen was a huge."

Her Movies Are Finally Doing Better

In 2013, her thriller The Call was an unexpected hit, earning more than $51 million at the box office. Now, X-Men: Days of Future Past is one of the breakout hits of the summer and is already her second-highest grossing movie to date (behind X-Men: The Last Stand), and still going strong.

Now, we just have to see if she can use her mutant powers to turn all those Storm fans into Extant.

Images: Dale Robinette/CBS; Getty Images; Giphy