Halle Berry, Xun Zhou racially transform in Cloud Atlas

By now, most everyone knows "Cloud Atlas" is a mind-bending, epic tale spanning centuries -- within which individual characters are reborn. Many of the leading actors in the film portray several different people in different eras, with different hair color, and sometimes appearing as a different race, even gender.

Halle Berry, who is biracial, and Chinese actress Xun Zhou do some race-bending in the film. Both of them portray white women at two different points in the epically long 2-hour, 44-minute cinematic journey, made by the creators of "The Matrix" and "Run Lola run" (the Wakowski siblings, and Tom Tykwer, respectively). Incidentally, South Korean actress Doona Bae -- who is getting a lot of buzz for her performance in "Atlas" -- also transforms into a white woman at a certain point.

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Berry plays a litany of characters in the film, but the white woman she portrays is Jocasta Ayrs, a not-so-true, rather kinky wife of a composer (Jim Broadbent).

Xun Zhou also transforms into another race in 'Cloud Atlas.' (Photo: Getty Images/Warner Bros. Pictures)

And Zhou's white character is the wife of Tom Hanks in the far future when the world has gone to hell. SPOILER: She and her family eventually get killed by a cannibalistic Hugh Grant.

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Along with crossing racial lines with the help of heavy makeup -- and in some instances prosthetics and eye contacts -- Hugo Weaving and James D'Arcy bend their genders by playing women. Weaving is especially memorable as the evil Nurse Noakes.

And Berry takes it even a step further: She plays an old Korean male doctor at one point in the film.

To make all the race-bending more fun, Jim Sturgess also transforms into an Asian character.

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