Mahershala Ali on Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and the impact of representation
The two-time Oscar winner joined us for an LFF Screen Talk to discuss the cost of acclaim, portraying a Black father, and the challenge of finding fully realised roles now he's stepping up to play leading men.
The crowning achievement of any movie actor is an Oscar. Mahershala Ali has two, for Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018). A podium, a mantlepiece, a framed shelf? Nope. “This is going to sound crazy, but I keep them in a cabinet. I can’t see them right now.”
Responding to host Amon Warmann’s light-hearted icebreaker about his Oscars, Ali explained that he’d needed to put them out of sight to get back to the work, lest he start “patting yourself on the back”.
His upcoming projects include Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Bassam Tariq’s drama exploring faith, fatherhood and grief, and LAIKA’s stop-motion animation Wildwood.
Before the Oscars came supporting roles and a desire to explore the “edges of his talents”, as Ali put it. He’s also learned a thing or two about one of acting’s oldest platitudes: that there are no small parts.
Ali turns his head slightly towards the audience and leans in, like a parent about to break the news that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. “They say there’s no small parts in acting, but it’s not true.” The theatre erupts in laughter.
Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age drama Moonlight earned Ali his first Oscar for playing Juan, a drug dealer who becomes an unlikely father figure to the young protagonist Chiron. “I’m not in the film that much, but what Barry did for those 20 minutes I am in the film…”
With Moonlight now 10 years old, the conversation turned beyond Ali’s own career trajectory to the film’s significance for the Black LGBTQIA+ community and its place in bringing Black queer experiences of intimacy and identity into mainstream cinema. At this point, Ali adjusted his tinted glasses to wipe away his tears. The audience’s applause filled the silent moments as he searched for the words. “I’m just really grateful for any time I get to put flesh on the bones of those who haven’t been seen,” he said.
His second Oscar, for Green Book, recognised Ali’s nuanced portrayal of virtuoso pianist Don Shirley, a Black musician navigating racism while touring the segregated American South with his white driver, Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen). But the win brought complications. Shirley’s family criticised the film for misrepresenting his relationship with his relatives and Lip. Ali recalled going from feeling like a “golden boy for a moment” to questioning what had happened.
Watching clips of his work is another matter. Ali sheepishly bowed his head until each one finished. Asked whether he enjoyed watching himself act, he replied, “I tolerate it.”
For all his vulnerability and candour, there were still subjects Ali wouldn’t touch. Asked whether he could confirm he’d already recorded his lines for the upcoming Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, he hesitated, wary of revealing anything about his involvement in the closely guarded production. “Yeah, no, err,” he said. Marvel’s iron-clad, blood-oath NDA remains undefeated.
Across his recent career, Ali has found his ways to double and sometimes triple his time on screen: playing Wayne Hays at different stages of his life in TV’s True Detective (2019); both Cameron and his clone Jack in the sci-fi Swan Song (2021); and Aaron Davis and his alternate-dimension counterparts in the Spider-Verse franchise. As he playfully concedes, he’s a “greedy actor”.
Director Bassam Tariq wrote the role of Latif in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother with Ali in mind, after their planned collaboration on the ill-fated Blade reboot fell through. Ali brings an imposing physical presence to the devout Muslim father and hitman whose wife’s death leaves him raising his children while grappling with faith, grief and responsibility. The contrast between the tenderness he brings to fatherhood and the ferociousness of a fighter comes into focus in the film’s most memorable moments, where the lines between protector and perpetrator begin to blur.
Asked what excited him about bringing a story centred on faith and Black Islam to the screen, Ali reflected on the limited ways Black fathers are portrayed. “I don’t feel like Black fathers have the dimensionality that I would love for them to have,” he said. He spoke, too, of the importance of giving Black Muslim characters the space to be seen in all their complexity. “We’re just a group of people who haven’t really had our day in the sun in terms of having a real opportunity to show how regular, normal, and, for lack of a better word, human we are as well.”
Ali returned to the space a character needs to be fully realised. “If you’re not being written for, there’s a lot that’s going unsaid… If you’re not at the centre of a story, you’re on the periphery, at the edges. All those people are less developed.”
Remarkably, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother marks only Ali’s second time as leading man, following Swan Song. “Everything else has truly been a reaction to the best of what was out there. ‘Okay, I’ll do this. All right, cool, I’ll do that. Or let me really try to fight to get this one.’ That’s sort of been my experience for most of my career. I’ve had a pretty good career, you know?”
After 26 years in the industry, the occasion has all the makings of a victory lap. Ali, however, sees himself at the starting line. “Not that life owes me anything, but in terms of the stories I’m choosing to tell and the conversation I’d like to have around them, that’s kind of just started for me… I finally feel tired in the right way.”
Mahershala Ali was speaking at his Screen Talk at the 70th BFI London Film Festival.