BAFTA and two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali shared insights into his work, career and new existential crime thriller, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, at a crowded London cinema on Saturday.
He spoke during a Screen Talk session as part of the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF), which wraps up on Sunday.
Asked where he keeps his two Oscars for his roles in Moonlight and Green Book, Ali said: “This is going to sound crazy. They’re in a cabinet. I can’t see them right now. I was feeling too accomplished in some weird way. This sounds crazy, but I needed to move them out of my sightline so I could get back to the work.”
How did he feel about the two Oscar wins? “I felt a sense of accomplishment, which is not fulfillment,” the star shared. “Those are different experiences. … Even gratitude is different from accomplishment, which is different from fulfillment. I feel I’m closer to that space now of feeling fulfilled on some level in terms of the work.”
In that context, he pointed out that his newest role is only his second lead role after Swan Song. Indeed, in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim and contract killer who travels across Houston in an effort to protect his three children following the death of his wife. He faces dangerous obstacles, including John Cho’s Haun Yoon, an Army veteran and militant church leader who is determined to destroy what he deems great evils.
How was playing a Black Muslim living in the U.S. as, well, a Black Muslim living in the U.S.? Ali said for him it was all about “humanizing, which I guess is always my job. I think I am naturally attracted to things that feel really unique.”
Later in Saturday’s talk, the actor touched on that same theme when discussing Moonlight. “I’m really grateful for any time that you can put flesh on the bones of those who haven’t been seen … to make a contribution to a community of people who so often are not looked at as being worthy or human enough,” he explained.
About his latest role, Ali said that “Latif feels really passionate about justice. And in this American lens, … people are not punished for their crimes against Black men the way they are against other people, especially when we look at law enforcement and things of that nature. So that impacts how we move through the world. It impacts how we look at the justice system. It impacts how we view and weigh justice in our lives in general. And so that would create a character like Latif, who feels like it is his duty and his right to be the one who is the determining factor.”
After joining the graduate acting programme at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Ali became a regular on the series Crossing Jordan and Threat Matrix before his breakthrough role in the sci-fi series The 4400. He then made an impact on the big screen in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and also played Remy Danton in House of Cards. His role as a surrogate father figure in Moonlight established him as a major star and saw him win an Oscar. He followed that up with a second Academy Award, alongside a BAFTA and Golden Globe, by playing Dr. Donald Shirley, a gifted pianist touring the Deep South in the 1960s, in Green Book.
Hosted by Amon Warmann, critic and contributing editor at Empire magazine, Saturday’s LFF Screen Talk also saw Ali address controversy that ended up surrounding Green Book amid accusations of historical inaccuracies and a lack of consultation with the family depicted. “I stand by the work. I stand by the experience as a whole and what it taught me,” Ali said on Saturday. “Even what it taught me in terms of feeling like a golden boy for a moment, and then feeling like you violated something in some way, and going, ‘Oh, what happened? What did I do?’ I was trying to take advantage of the opportunities that came my way and give honor to these characters, especially real people, as best as I could.”
He continued: “There’s a lot of controversy around the family and what they permitted and didn’t. It was my first time having anything of that … and all that was just new information to me, and so there were some real challenges around all that and all the reaction to it — all the somewhat vitriolic response to the film taking off the way it did. It was a whole mixed bag, and I’m just sensitive in general. So it definitely had its impact.”
He followed up a grueling shoot for Green Book with months on a season of True Detective, in which he played the same character at ages 35, 45 and 70. “I almost went crazy doing that part,” he recalled on Saturday. “It wasn’t a good time. It was weird. It’s a strange thing to try to express, but it just feels good to have survived that mountain — having climbed it and survived it.”
“It was so deeply difficult. Any time I was old [as the character], those were 80-hour weeks, because I would be in the trailer at 3:30 in the morning for them to put that makeup on for four hours, and then we went and shot 14 hours — because we never made our days, never ever,” he continued. “So it was seven months coming off the three months of Green Book.”
His other roles include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Swan Song and Leave the World Behind, among others.
Toward the end of his appearance, Ali said he is now working on season two of Task, the HBO crime drama starring Mark Ruffalo. Going back to what he had said earlier about fulfillment, he signaled that he has started to feel it. “I feel exhausted for the right reasons, I feel tired for the right reasons, I feel in some ways justified being away from family and friends,” he shared. “That’s why I feel like I’m just getting started.”