Mahershala Ali broke down in tears on stage at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday as he recalled the young boy at the heart of “Moonlight.” The Barry Jenkins drama won him one of his two Oscars and recently marked its 10th anniversary. During a Screen Talk hosted by Amon Warmann, Ali was discussing the dinner-table scene in which young Chiron asks Juan, the drug dealer Ali plays, whether he sells drugs. The man was arrested and sent to prison while Ali was in college, which left the actor stunned.
He was candid about the backlash that followed “Green Book,” in which he played pianist Don Shirley opposite Viggo Mortensen. It was his first role of that magnitude, and the backlash included the controversy over what Shirley’s family had and hadn’t sanctioned. I stand by the work,” Ali said, adding that he also stands by “the experience as a whole, and what it taught me.” Ali, who won his second Oscar for the role, described going from feeling like a golden boy to wondering what he had done wrong.
So it definitely like had its impact, like for sure,” he said, adding that he was grateful for the exposure. Ali voices Aaron Davis in the animated “Spider-Verse” films, including a version of the character from another universe who appears at the end of “Across the Spider-Verse” and returns in “Beyond the Spider-Verse.” Asked how he tells the two apart, he said: “I don’t want to give anything away or spoil anything, I’ve got to be careful.” Pressed on whether he had finished recording, he joked: “I might not even be in it, man! I don’t know!” He was more forthcoming about the process.
Actors are filmed in the booth, and their improvised moments often make it into the finished film, sometimes prompting rewrites and extra recording sessions. The actor went straight from “Green Book” into “True Detective,” with only a week or two off, to play detective Wayne Hays across three timelines. Playing the older Hays meant 80-hour weeks, with four hours in the makeup chair from 3:30 a.m.
The shoot ran seven months, and his daughter was a year old at the time. Two of Ali’s films are screening at the festival. He voices bandit leader Brendan in the animated “Wildwood.” In action thriller “Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother,” he plays Latif, a devout Muslim father and contract killer, and had three or four days to learn the fight choreography.
On playing a Black Muslim father, Ali said: “I don’t feel like Black fathers have the dimensionality that I would love for them to have.” Now at work on the HBO series “Task” with Mark Ruffalo, Ali said he feels “exhausted for the right reasons” and “tired in the right way.” “So that’s why I feel like I’m just getting started,” he said.
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