Miami ‘Moonlight’ has Bay Area roots
This past spring actor Mahershala Ali returned to St. Mary’s College in Moraga, his alma mater, to deliver a commencement address to the class of 2016. In a year in which the 1996 graduate is seemingly everywhere — appearing off-Broadway in the play “Short People,” in Carrie Brownstein’s (“Portlandia”) short “The Realest Real,” as villain Cottonmouth Stokes in the Marvel series “Luke Cage,” and in the films “Free State of Jones,” “Kicks,” “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures”—the 42-year-old actor made a startling statement in his speech:
“I am more of a work in progress than a success.”
That progress has been steady. After leaving St. Mary’s, he apprenticed with California Shakespeare Theater, where he played Montjoy in a production of “Henry V,” and further honed his craft in the graduate acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His first job out of school was the lead in a 2000 Arena Stage production of “The Great White Hope.” He made his television debut in 2001, playing medical examiner Dr. Trey Sanders for a season on “Crossing Jordan.” Since then, Ali has become familiar to movie audiences for such films as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Predator,” “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 and 2.” Television audiences know him from “Threat Matrix,” “The 4400,” “Treme,” and as lobbyist and lawyer Remy Danton on “House of Cards.”
Ali is truly the local kid made good. He was born in Oakland and raised in Hayward, where he went first to Hayward High School and then to Mount Eden High School.
“I was moving around for a few years,” he says during a chat at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “Moonlight” screened. “I moved around a lot and eventually got settled in South Hayward.”
In “Moonlight,” Ali plays Juan, a Miami drug dealer who is both a savior to the young boy at the heart of the story and a predator in feeding addiction within his community. The actor doesn’t condone the character’s career, but understands it in the context of a young person growing up with limited possibilities.
“Growing up in the Bay Area and in some ways, it’s about being an African Amer-
ican or a person of color, it comes down to options, about what it is that people have access to, the type of education they have access to, what their family home is like,” Ali says.
Ali did have options, although acting was not initially one of them when he enrolled at St. Mary’s on a basketball scholarship. By the time he graduated, sports were in his rearview mirror as he nurtured his talent for writing, particularly poetry, and found himself drawn to the stage.
Before he ever enrolled in an acting class, Rebecca Engle, a professor at St. Mary’s, encountered Ali on a panel for the school’s High Potential program, a kind of boot camp for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. As Ali talked about his own situation, including being the son of teenage parents and raised by his grandmother, Engle was struck by his poise and his wisdom.
“That’s an old soul,” says Engle. “He was eloquent. He was funny. And fabulous.”
Engle invited Ali to audition for the small but important role of a military policeman in a school production she was mounting of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves.” He got the part, and after basketball practice every day, he would come to rehearsal. After that play, he enrolled in one of Engle’s acting classes.
“In that context, it became clear that he had a lot of ability, a lot of
potential ... not just a commanding presence,” Engle says. “At the end of that class, he said to me, ‘Rebecca, you should just tell your students that acting comes from the soul.’ ”
Writer/director Barry Jenkins admits that when “Moonlight” producer Adele Romanski, who had worked with Ali when she produced “Kicks,” suggested him for “Moonlight,” he was initially dubious. He knew Ali primarily from “House of Cards” and could not imagine Remy Danton as Juan. But Romanski was insistent that the actor had tremendous range.
“So, I met with him and, right away, I understood what she was speaking about,” Jenkins says. “The way he talked about the script and the way he talked about the character, I understood that, even if he doesn’t do exactly what’s on the page, he’s going to take it somewhere that’s really unique.”
And while Juan may be a Cuban drug dealer in Miami, his roots for Ali are firmly Bay Area. The actor only had to look back to his own youth to find him.
“Juan is someone that I knew,” Ali says. “I grew up with a Juan . ... This guy was the cleanest man I knew. He had this yellow Corvette. He washed it every day. It was a ’73 Corvette . ... He took care of himself. He lived really humbly but clean. He kept himself totally together. He had a legitimate job. He had a good job, but then quietly, he had this drug hustle. Once I got to college, he got arrested and went away. I loved this guy, always looked up to him, always respected him, but he kept that away from me. I had no idea, but he had been a drug dealer for years.”
In his commencement address, Ali identified patience, perseverance and prayer as the key elements in an actor’s life, from his perspective. After two decades of steady progress, that patience and perseverance are paying big dividends. Prayers have been answered.
“The talent is just a piece of it,” Engle says. “Mahershala also has the athlete’s hunger for excellence and a sense of commitment to his own inner voice and his own inner possibilities that a writer has.
“Those of us knew him when, so to say, have been waiting for him to get the parts, just waiting.”