TORONTO – Marvel film fans were stoked when Mahershala Ali was cast in “Blade” and summarily let down when that inspired casting didn't come to fruition.
No one was more disappointed than Ali, who’d already been waiting several years for his action-movie moment. The two-time Oscar winner didn’t get to play a super-cool, butt-kicking vampire hunter, but he does get to use his “Blade” training as a widowed Muslim hitman with awesome fight skills in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” (in select theaters Sept. 25, expanding nationwide in October).
It’s rare for an action movie to “require you to go deep, because some of it can be stunt porn, so to speak, or it's so much about the action and the story is somewhere in the back,” Ali tells USA TODAY
a day after the movie’s world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival.
He doesn’t even necessarily think of “Your Mother” as being in the genre, “but it's required of me to be ready for the action at any given moment. And I'm glad to have finally had the opportunity to sort of not only exercise that desire but also those muscles.”
Directed by Bassam Tariq, “Your Mother” stars Ali as Latif, who has become both mother and father for his three children, including a baby, after the death of his wife. At the same time, he also kills people for money but has a no-guns code. Because his baby is allergic to formula, Latif is desperate to figure out a way to get breast milk – a situation that gets considerably hairier when he ticks off the wrong people and an army of bad guys who work for an unhinged anti-porn evangelist (John Cho) comes after him.
Ali, 52, has been in a bunch of action-packed projects, but never got a chance to do the actual “action” part. Something like “Jurassic World Rebirth” doesn’t count “because you’re just like, yeah, I’m driving a boat or just running from a tennis ball,” he says. And, sure, he was in “Predators,” but his character dies as the movie starts.
“As one of the rare former athletes in the industry, it absolutely drove me nuts,” says Ali, who played basketball at St. Mary’s College of California. “I always dreamt of having a role that required me to go off and train, because you hear all these stories about these actors going off and picking up a skill, and that being a characteristic of a part they were playing.”
So for “Blade,” Ali trained in sword work and different forms of martial arts for more than a year starting in 2022. He had to give it up for a bit when he blew out his knee and had surgery, but “that was a joy getting to reengage with my body in a way but for the purpose of telling a story,” he says. “And then that didn't seem like it was going to happen.”
Tariq had also been the director attached to “Blade,” so when he wrote the script for “Your Mother” and reteamed with Ali, the actor got a second chance. “We didn't have a ‘Blade’ budget or a James Bond budget to do this movie, so we had a fraction of the time to prep that you would have for any of those films with those big action pieces,” says Ali. Instead, he “had to just get back on the bike and learn some of this choreography between takes and camera setups.”
Still, Ali finally got to let loose with a blade in several scenes, including one where he’s faced with a seemingly insurmountable number of foes.
“It was so fun,” Ali says. “I’m so proud of what we were able to put up on that screen, considering our limitations. I feel like we knocked it out of the box.
“But it was because of that year that Marvel paid for my training that I was able to execute it in this. So, yeah, they helped pay for our film in that way, whether they wanted to or not. It wasn't going to go to waste.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mahershala Ali finally puts his 'Blade' training to use in 'Your Mother'
