Channeling pain of black artists
Mahershala Ali sees Hollywood’s changing attitude
Roughly halfway through “Green Book,” about one of the unlikeliest friendships of the civil rights era, Jamaican piano prodigy Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), explains to his Italian-American driver and companion, Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), that though he’s found success playing popular music, he was trained for the classical stage.
“Trained?” says Vallelonga. “What are you, a seal? People love what you do. Anyone can sound like Beethoven or Joe Pan or them other guys you said. But your music, what you do, only you can do that.”
“Thank you, Tony,” Shirley says patiently. “But not everyone can play Chopin, not like I can.”
The scene, one of the film’s most poignant insights into the musician’s conflicted feelings about his identity and legacy, was not always written that way.
“Dr. Shirley used to just say, ‘Thank you, Tony,’ and that’s it, that’s the scene,” recalled Ali over lunch in Los Feliz, Calif. “That scene always ate at me. It just didn’t ring true to me as a black person. It felt like what I would call a ‘TV moment.’ ”
After watching Nina Simone’s Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” Ali was able to pinpoint just what it was that bugged him about the scene and brought it to director Peter Farrelly.
“I spoke at length with him about Nina Simone in that, as much as we love and appreciate her music, she didn’t become who she wanted to become, she became who she was allowed to become,” he said of the legendary dive-bar chanteuse, who’d originally had designs on being a classical pianist.
“And Don Shirley was the same way.” “Green Book,” which is now playing nationwide, is already being floated as a potential best picture nominee.
Ali’s portrayal of the emotionally tortured Shirley is all but guaranteed to earn him a supporting actor nod.
If so, it would mark his second Academy Award nomination, after a breakout turn in Barry Jenkins’ dazzling “Moonlight,” for which he took home the trophy in 2016.
But awards consideration, though appreciated, couldn’t be less of a driving force for the actor.
“For me, it’s about the diversity of my experience as an actor,” he said. “I’m just constantly looking for something that feels appropriate for me at the time. I don’t ever want to do something I’ve already done. I’m not interested in that at all.”
Though Farrelly calls him an “unbelievable actor,” the director was hesitant to cast Ali because of the tonal difference between the outwardly powerful drugdealer Juan in “Moonlight” and the more delicate, internal restraint of Shirley.
“He was such an imposing figure in ‘Moonlight,’ ” Farrelly said. “He was big and strong and really a force. And Dr. Shirley is not that. I thought maybe Mahershala might be too big a figure for this film, but when I met him, and he talked about who this guy was, he quickly became him. It was such an impressive performance.”
“This is going to sound like B.S., but it was an honor and a pleasure (working with Ali),” Mortensen said. “For me, the foundation of good acting is always good reacting. I’m looking at his face and there are all these incredible, minute, beautiful reactions. Like, so precise, his work. It was really difficult to keep a straight face because he was so hilarious and getting perfect timing.”
The painstaking performances of the two leads elevate the film’s fairly simple premise: In 1962, Shirley, a distinguished pianist, prepares to embark on a concert tour that will take him through the Deep South.
He knows he needs to hire some muscle, which is where Lip comes in, a racist bouncer who just lost his job at Manhattan’s Copacabana nightclub.
(The title “Green Book” came from “The Negro Motorist Green-Book,” Victor Hugo Green’s guide for African-Americans to find safe accommodations in segregated Southern towns.)
Ali was immediately sold on the opportunity to play a character as dynamic and rich in texture as Shirley.
“Don Shirley was exceptional ... I haven’t seen him on film,” he said. “The opportunity to step into the shoes of a man with that much complexity — who spoke eight languages, was a piano prodigy, had affluence and was successful and connected — even though he’s in an environment that limits his freedom, I think that he has more power than any other black character that I’ve personally seen in a pre-civil-rights-era film or story.”
Though it only makes sense that conversations about race dominate the press run for “Green Book,” Ali says it’s a nagging point of discussion no matter what project he’s promoting.
“When I go and do these press junkets ... I always spend a good 30 percent to 40 percent of the time talking about race,” he said. “You spend so much time as a black artist speaking about the black experience that it’s almost like the writers are conditioned to speak to me on those terms. Which is cool, but they still don’t necessarily reserve enough space to really get into the nuances of the work.”
But Ali says that Hollywood is much more open to diverse stories and storytellers now than in the recent past.
“I think Hollywood is always ready to embrace a new vein, a new anything that’s going to help expand storytelling that is also economically beneficial,” he said. “If Hollywood is making money off of something, then they want to figure out ways to tap into that. And for us, the positive thing is that we get to tell our stories how we want to tell them.”