Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival, Mahershala Ali says he moved his two Oscars out of his sightline so he could keep working.
Two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali spoke at a Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday, hosted by Amon Warmann, critic and contributing editor at Empire magazine. Asked where he keeps the two Oscars he won for Moonlight and Green Book, Ali said: "This is going to sound crazy. They're in a cabinet. I can't see them right now."
He said he had been "feeling too accomplished in some weird way" and needed to move the statuettes out of his sightline "so I could get back to the work."
Asked how he felt about the two wins, he drew a line between two feelings:
"I felt a sense of accomplishment, which is not fulfillment."
Ali broke down in tears on stage when he recalled Moonlight, the Barry Jenkins drama that recently marked its 10th anniversary. Ali was talking about the scene at the dinner table where Chiron, still a boy, asks Juan, the dealer he portrays, whether he sells drugs. "You see this like crisis for this young boy who's already in crisis," he said. "It's really heartbreaking."
When Warmann asked what accounted for the film's enduring power, Ali paused and wiped away tears. "Sorry, just need a second," he said. Once he had composed himself, he said: "Any time people put flesh on the bones of those who haven't been seen or had their moment, I think it's important."
For the role of Juan, Ali took inspiration from a man he had known his whole life: an uncle-like figure, with whom he played hoops, and who was also a supply teacher. Ali was in college when that man was taken into custody and jailed, a development that shocked him. "I thought of him a lot in the making of the film because of how human everyone was in my environment and in my upbringing," Ali said.
Ali was candid about the backlash to Green Book, in which he played pianist Don Shirley opposite Viggo Mortensen. Among the complaints were claims that the film got history wrong and that the depicted family had not been asked for input. "I stand by the work. I stand by the experience as a whole and what it taught me," he said. He described going from "feeling like a golden boy for a moment" to feeling that he had violated something, and said of the controversy: "It was my first time having anything of that."
Right after Green Book, he moved on to True Detective after only one or two weeks off, playing detective Wayne Hays over three time periods. Portraying the older version of Hays required 80-hour weeks, and the makeup took four hours, starting at 3:30 a.m. Production went on for seven months, and at that time his daughter was one year old. "I almost went crazy doing that part," he said. "It was so deeply difficult."
Two of his films are screening at the festival. He voices bandit leader Brendan in the animated Wildwood. In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, he plays Latif, a devout Muslim and contract killer who travels across Houston to protect his three children after the death of his wife. He faces dangerous obstacles, including John Cho's Haun Yoon, an Army veteran and militant church leader. He was given three or four days to pick up the fight choreography. "It's really more like dance than what people realize," he said.
On playing a Black Muslim living in the U.S., Ali said it was all about "humanizing, which I guess is always my job." On playing a Black Muslim father, he said: "I don't feel like Black fathers have the dimensionality that I would love for them to have."
In the animated Spider-Verse franchise, Ali provides the voice of Aaron Davis, including a counterpart from a different universe who shows up at the close of Across the Spider-Verse and comes back 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, man! I don't know!"
He was more open about the process. Performers record in a booth where they're filmed, and improvised moments often make it into the finished film, sometimes prompting rewrites and extra recording sessions. "I think that's why, honestly, the animation films will hold up better than live-action films," Ali said.
He said: "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 went on: "That's why I feel like I'm just getting started." Currently he's at work on the second season of Task, an HBO crime series with Mark Ruffalo in the lead.
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