When Mahershala met Mahershala
The award-winning actor on acting opposite himself in new sci-fi drama SWAN SONG
TWO-TIME ACADEMY Award-winner Mahershala Ali has shared scenes with some of the best actors in the business — but as scene partners go, few will be as memorable or intense as, erm, two-time Academy Award-winner Mahershala Ali. In his new film Swan Song, a low-key sci-fi set in the near future, Ali plays Cameron, a family man with a terminal illness who enlists a scientist (played by Glenn Close) to create a perfect clone who can secretly replace him after he dies. Ali, naturally, plays both roles.
“It was like acting for the first time,” he says. “The process was just unlike any other experience that I’ve ever had.” Immediately struck by the genre-bending script from Irish writer-director Benjamin Cleary, Ali was especially drawn to how grounded it felt. The futuristic elements are “peripheral”, he says. “Even with the cloning of it all, it still just feels so human. I just felt like I’d never seen this movie before.”
Ever the instinctive, thoughtful actor (as his awards-laden roles in Moonlight and Green Book have shown), the reality of multiple Mahershalas took some work. “It was a challenge,” says Ali. “It was confusing at times. Until it wasn’t.” The actor filmed his scenes with a stand-in, whose performance was digitally replaced later.
“Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time, there’s this give-and-take with the other actor,” he explains. “You’re working off what they’re giving you, they’re working off what you’re giving them.” Here, Ali had to explain to his stand-in what he expected to do — “because at some point, you’re gonna have to be on the other side of that camera.”
The logistics were complicated. “You play one character, then you change your clothes, and go play the other,” says Ali. “Then they move the camera, and you change back.” Some days would see multiple swaps. But despite playing two genetically identical characters, he was able to get into the headspace of each with relative ease. “They clearly wanted different things,” Ali says. “It was fairly clear, once I got into the rhythm of filming, what the differences were between the two characters.”
Seeing himself twice over was, he admits, “a bit shocking! On our first day of doing the twinning, within a half-hour of shooting, Ben asked me to come over to the monitor. They showed me a rough version of what it was going to look like. I was just blown away by how seamless it all felt.”
The film, and the characters, ponder some deep ethical questions about cloning, too, without taking a firm moral position. “I love that we don’t tell people how to feel about it,” Ali says. He has himself “wrestled with that [debate] a lot”, but “leans towards the side of respecting the natural process of life and death. But I really respect the idea. It’s really tempting, to say the least, if that was a reality.” For now, though, there can be only one Mahershala.