Mahershala Ali Makes His Own Hero Moment in ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’
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At this point, Ali has officially moved on. “If they wanted to do it, we would've done it,” he tells GQ of Marvel ’s failure to launch his Blade movie. (Marvel’s Kevin Feige has blamed the delay on a script that never came together, while admitting that he felt like “a gigantic loser and a failure” after the project foundered.) But in the course of his long, ultimately unsuccessful journey to bring the vampire hunter back to the big screen, Ali acquired the necessary skills—and connected with the perfect director—to make a movie he says might be the most rewarding work of his career, which is quite the bold statement from a two-time Oscar winner.
Adding to this, After making his narrative feature debut with 2020’s Mogul Mowgli , Bassam Tariq was hired to direct Ali in the reboot of Blade , whose pre-MCU incarnation starred Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter. But, in Sept. 2022, with production supposed to be just months away, Tariq departed the project , before a near-tragedy in his own life inspired him to write Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother . The filmmaker always envisioned a reunion with Ali, who eagerly signed on to Bassim’s new project as Latif, a devout Muslim who works as a hitman in Houston . His world and beliefs are shaken when his wife suddenly dies, leaving him to care for his newborn and two other children.
Meanwhile, “I didn't feel great about the fact that things finished the way that they did [with Blade ]; I like seeing things through,” Ali says, adding that he “couldn’t say no” after reading Tariq’s script: “I was really attracted to the challenge of playing a character that felt so stretched, but also the intimacy of his situation and the potential care he would take in executing his mission. All TV and films are hard, and I just want it to be difficult for the right reasons, and it felt like this was going to be that. I'm so grateful that we were able to see this through and find what I believe is the right thing together.”
Notably, As dramatic as the stakes are for Latif in Your Mother , he also has to kick plenty of ass. In the midst of his search for breast milk for his baby, Latif is pulled into a political and religious war, putting him on the wrong side of the dangerous and colorful Pastor Hwan Yoon ( John Cho ), a former soldier who has founded the radical Church of Divine Fire.
As per the latest buzz, Jaclyn Martinez/Courtesy of Amazon “Even with the teaser , Mahershala and I were like, ‘How do we explain what this movie is?’” Tariq explains. “Something that I realized was so central to this movie is this concept of mercy. Cinematically, it's not as sexy as justice, retribution, and vengeance, but, to me, mercy is the thread that we hang on. And what's mercy if it's not being forgiven or getting a pass when you don't deserve it? I was always curious, and I’d never seen an action movie that dealt with it.”
In further updates, The aforementioned teaser—which smartly included Ali holding a sword—generated a “fresh and new” level of excitement that the star admits to having never experienced before. Below, Ali and Tariq fully peel back the curtain on Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother , while Ali also explains why he’s done talking about Blade.
On top of that, Mahershala Ali: I would agree with you, and I’m glad we were able to satisfy that and kind of move on. I'm looking forward to what this movie is able to do from the standpoint of incorporating action elements that you’d expect in a big-budget superhero piece, but we did that in a real mom-and-pop, couple bag of nickels way. And I actually love that we were limited. We got to lean into action when it was appropriate, and the story gets to go to an almost magical realism place, which you can do with these superhero stories. But this story presents an opportunity to be uniquely deep. The breadth of what Bassam was able to achieve, there's so much there to tackle, and I don't think we could have done that in a big-budget studio movie. So if it's a this or that type of thing, personally, for me, I would take this. It was a really fulfilling experience.
Bassam Tariq : I didn’t even tell Mahershala this until of late, but, in the earliest drafts of this, I didn't even have a name for the character — I just wrote “Mahershala.” Because I've been imagining, how do you carry dignity and grief, and have grace under fire? It's a tough thing. Some actors are incredible thespians, but when they move or run, they can't nail it. Mahershala is an athlete, and I saw the way he uses a sword on Blade . The first time he was doing sword practice on Blade , the stuff coming back was incredible. Then, here, it was exceptional to see the way Mahershala rose to that occasion; he was able to anchor it all.
Source: GQ