Mahershala Ali Quotes
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It's funny how you can be thought of as somebody who humanizes bad guys, and I'll take that, but it is something that gave me pause, and I started speaking to my team about finding a good guy.
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Theater will cast in a more open way; Denzel Washington might play Richard III. Television and film don't really cast openly like that. The theater world has always been a leader in diversity.
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It's a lot of wonderful things about the Bay area and Oakland that I absolutely love. I wouldn't change being from there by any stretch.
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I grew up on a wide range of stuff. OutKast, they been around for over 20 years, and some of the L.A. cats like Defari, Dilated Peoples and Likwit Crew. I was always going to these shows and catching the KRS-One tennis ball, as he would throw those out, EPMD. I could go on and on.
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People are really paying attention to the comic-book genre, and there's a lot of time and attention being invested in these projects with a wonderful sense of quality control.
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'Mahershala' is my nickname.
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I prayed every day of my life, and that was instilled in me as a kid, and as I've gotten older, that's just matured in me.
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One thing that the audience, and perhaps critics, aren't aware of is that, especially in a film like 'Moonlight,' you always shoot a lot more footage than makes the cut of the film.
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Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity.
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I got out of grad school in 2000. I was about 26 years old. I've always said that I was late to acting because I didn't really start doing it in a focused way until I was in my early 20s.
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I don't want to say I took myself too seriously, but I put a lot of pressure on myself coming out of school. I saw so many people leave the business behind, certain opportunities disappear for folks who had to go into other professions. That kind of terrified me. As a result, I wanted things to happen really quickly.
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'Moonlight' is a project that resonated with me more than anything else. I wouldn't have done 'Luke Cage' if they hadn't made time for 'Moonlight.'
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I was a sports kid.
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I have had that same experience where there are several people who have come up in my life at the right time and have made critical contributions to how I see the world and how I see myself.
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The people that I admire have a wonderful balance of self-belief and humility.
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I do believe that there are creative chakras or different sorts of energy centers.
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The work that I do with all of my characters is have some sense of where they come from. I kind of create my own story for myself. What's going on with my parents? Are they alive? Or family - do I have children? Do you see those things or not?
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I've never seen 'Gone with the Wind.' I don't know if that's something to be embarrassed about, but I know that I should have seen that movie by now.
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I do believe in the potential of like-minded people coming together.
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My parents were in high school when I was born. My mom was 16, my dad was 17. They were kids, at the very beginning of coming into their own and finding themselves.
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I remember clearly, when I was about 4, my Aunt Linda said, 'I'm not babysitting him no more. He's bad.' It was one of the first conscious shifts I remember making. I decided, 'I'm going to be good now.'
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There's this Method Man album called 'Tical.' It's his first album. I would just listen to that every day, because the album feels like, if it were a film, it would be black and white. It feels like there's a war percolating throughout the album itself. It's dark, and it has a nice forward pace to it.
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At a earlier age, I was kind of into a pretty large scope or range of music from Hieroglyphics and the Hobo Junction guys and all that to like a lot of stuff that was in New York like Diamond D, Nas, Brand Nubian, of course Biggie, OC, Organized Confusion, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Digable Planets, who I just saw recently, and they killed it.
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I got my Equity card right out of NYU grad school in 2000, doing 'The Great White Hope' at Arena Stage. I played Jack Jefferson. It was an amazing part to walk into, to carry that responsibility for that amount of time. The challenges and the breadth of that role were pretty amazing.