A biography for Mahershala Alihasn’t been written yet.
“I think #OscarsSoWhite is about there not truly being enough people of color represented.”
“I haven't gotten to do the leading man thing, so I would love to do that!”
“There's nothing fun about 30 people standing around watching you, like, pretend to pleasure someone. Nothing enjoyable about it, believe me.”
“The people that I admire have a wonderful balance of self-belief and humility.”
“When you have these surprise breakout films that do well, that have good performances in them, it puts a lot of pressure on the Academy to recognize those projects, so it's more of a conversation about what is greenlit.”
“The things that people won't totally accept come in all shapes and sizes and forms, and I can relate to that in my own youth.”
“I had two jobs coming out of school: I did a play, 'The Great White Hope.' I played the boxer Jack Johnson. And I was the lead in this indie film. Then I moved to Los Angeles because New York was cold and it was really too quiet for me at that time. I was out of school; I was hungry. The auditions were trickling in, and I was antsy and ready to go.”
“What I think I learned from working on 'Moonlight' is you see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves.”
“Coming off 'House of Cards,' playing someone so straight-laced, I was getting offered a lot of F.B.I. agents.”
“Cultures and races are mixing in a very organic way in the world, and that should be reflected in film and television.”
“I wanted to get that Division I scholarship and play ball and go to school for free, and I was always about getting to that next step... I was always ahead of myself in some way, shape or form, and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being free and having creative agency, so to speak.”
“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.”
“'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.'”
“In my humble opinion, the ages 22 to about 27 are the most critical years of your adult life. It's your time to gestate in the cocoon of becoming.”
“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.”
“I love hip hop. It's such an appendage for me. It's something that's always shaped my experience out in the world.”
“I do believe in the potential of like-minded people coming together.”
“'Free State of Jones' went beyond that. It got into how the South wasn't as homogenous as we thought it was - or even the North for that matter, where we like to assume everyone wanted to free the slaves and they were all abolitionists. It actually shows how complex these ideologies were on both sides.”
“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.”
“At that moment in time when we feel like the other, we were not the person embraced, not one of the cool kids, not in the club - when you're that person, it makes you feel smaller, and when they persecute you as a result, that's a difficult position to be in.”