Giant Magazine is calling actress Paula Patton the next Halle Berry on their Winter 2009 magazine cover, but the Precious star wasn’t always so comfortable with herself — or her interracial marriage to crooner Robin Thicke.

Paula refused to attend her high school prom with the man who was to become her husband because he is White. She began dating soul singer Robin Thicke since they were both teenagers and she has only recently told him why they missed out on prom night.

“I didn’t want people to know (we were dating). I didn’t want people to call me a sellout or an Oreo, because I’d gotten that my whole life and it wasn’t the truth,” Paula recalls. “I actually just admitted this to Robin not too long ago.”

Robin tells Giant the news came as a no surprise: “She had actually told a couple of people I was black. Then prom night comes, we’d been together a year and a half, and she just lies and says she didn’t want to go instead of saying she didn’t want to take me.”

Paula and Robin married 2005 and are expecting their first child.