The one director Mahershala Ali has always dreamed of working with: “I would be honoured”
Oscar season is upon us, and as it stands, there are actually surprisingly few people who have won two Academy Awards for acting, at just 46 men and women in total in cinema history, and one of them is Mahershala Ali.
While he isn’t nominated this year, you wouldn’t bet against him making it three at some point in the future, who picked up his two golden statues for two of the most impressive performances in recent memory, first in 2016 for his role as a drug dealer in A24’s Moonlight and then again two years later for Green Book, the biographical comedy drama that saw him play the African-American pianist Don Shirley and won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’.
The first Muslim actor ever to have won an Oscar, Ali made his start in network TV before landing a role in his first major movie with Brad Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008 and then appearing in two Hunger Games movies in the years afterwards.
He then picked up an Emmy nomination for the Netflix political drama House of Cards and followed it up with two additional nods for his work on True Detective and the dark comedy Ramy.
While he may be something of a critic’s favourite, the actor is no stranger to blockbusters, lending his voice to the billion-dollar-grossing Spider-Verse movies as the troubled Uncle Aaron and appearing in last year’s inexplicably massive Jurassic World: Rebirth with Scarlett Johansson, which critics hated but pulled in a staggering $869million at the box office.
Ali has also worked under some top directors in his time, including Robert Rodriguez, Travis Knight and Gareth Edwards, but there’s one name missing from his list that he would love to rectify. Asked by GQ who he would nominate for a best director category, he replied, “Steven Soderbergh. As a kid, my dad would take me to see indie films when I would visit him in New York. Films that I just wouldn’t see growing up in the Bay Area. Seeing Soderbergh’s first movies, going to the theatre to see them, in their time; the fact that Soderbergh is still around, doing really good work…”
“I would be honoured to have an opportunity to work with him.”
Mahershala Ali on Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh has indeed been incredibly successful over a long period of time, making a directorial breakthrough with Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989 and then really kicking things up a notch a decade later with a string of huge titles like Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and the thriller Traffic for which he won a ‘Best Director’ Oscar, apart from reciveling countless nomination shouts for the others.
Recently, he changed his focused to personal projects and lower-budget movies like the fantastically spooky Presence in 2024, but came back in style with the acclaimed thriller Black Bag a year later, while Ali has been keeping busy with several projects in development, including the latest Spider-Verse movie, which will be released in 2027, and another animation called Wildwood, also featuring Carey Mulligan and Jemaine Clement.
He also has a major TV series from Disney coming up called The Plot, which tells the story of a struggling author who steals a story idea from a dead student, only to end up haunted by the theft. Since both are incredibly active in their lanes, let’s hope Ali’s dreams duly come true.
