By On the sort of sweltering October afternoon in London that would make even the most seasoned climate change sceptics scratch their heads, Mahershala Ali has had to abandon his car to pace through Piccadilly Circus.
The actor is due to speak at Esquire Townhouse later this afternoon but the Democratic Football Lads Alliance march has clashed with anti-fascists, and every few minutes another police car siren starts up.
"I thought that was for me," Ali says on entering the room and gesturing towards the protests. He laughs, "thought people were mad you couldn't get Ryan Gosling."
Dressed in a cropped ivory suit over a grey t-shirt and sporting a burgundy knitted skullcap and tinted orange sunglasses, it's safe to say his entrance has left everyone else in the room feeling a little drab.
Last night he attended a surprise screening of his new film, Green Book, at London Film Festival where it received an emphatic standing ovation. The Peter Farrelly film is based on the real story of a tour of the deep south Jamaican-American pianist Don Shirley (Ali) took with his driver, former bouncer, Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) in the 1960s.
Green Book won the prestigious People's Choice Award at Toronto International Film Festival - an award whose previous winners include Oscar successes Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, La La Land and 12 Years a Slave.
Ali only managed a few hours sleep after flying in yesterday but he remains unflappable and perfectly polite as he requests oat milk for his coffee, and sits perfectly still as a make-up artist puts two comma shaped masks under his eyes.
"For me I think doing Green Book was an attempt to go against the grain," he says when we sit down together, "but it was also the script that just resonated most with me at that time."
The grain he is referring to is the trajectory many actors take after winning an Oscar and scripts for richly financed films with other Oscar-winning actors start turning up on their doorstep.
But Ali - who four days before winning an Oscar for his role in Moonlight became a father for the first time - didn't want to say yes to the first shiny new offer. "I think it helped me keep things in perspective," he says in discussing the birth of his daughter. "Whatever is going on outside of that sort of pales in comparison."
M
ahershalalhashbaz Ali Gilmore grew up in a Hayward, California, a city near Oakland in the San Francisco Metropolitan Area. The Bay Area is still the only place in the world he permits his childhood nickname, Hershel.
His father left to pursue a career on Broadway but Ali would visit him in New York and watch Spike Lee or Robert Townsend films in the cinema. "We would get the big films [in Hayward] but we weren't getting Moonlight," he laughs, talking about how seeing films like The Deer Hunter or Star 80 left an impression on him.
However, it wasn't a moment in a film which inspired him to act. Instead he talks about writing poetry during high school when he suffered with bouts of insomnia. These "organically developed into monologues" which he used to audition for graduate school with.
After years ten or so years of appearances in CSI and Law & Order episodes and waiting for a big break, he started saying no to scripts that would turn up which weren't necessarily the same parts but "had a similar presence".
Then, in 2013, Ali was cast as lobbyist Remy Danton on Netflix's reboot of House Of Cards. It's a show he says "feels like a decade ago because the industry has changed so much" and laughs about how his grandmother told friends he was going to be on "that show that's on the computer" referring to its then-revolutionary distribution tactic of releasing all episodes at once.
But instead of providing him with the step-up he needed, Ali soon realised they weren't looking to expand his role beyond being a series regular and after three years he asked Netflix to let him move on.
"I knew it was time to get off House Of Cards when I would walk down the street and people would call me Remy," he says. "I don’t want to be identified solely by any character as I think it ends up robbing the audience. If they’re watching a film and seeing you as some superhero character you played I think it gets in the way of the work."
He later jokes the only reason he agreed to play Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes in Marvel's 2016 TV series Luke Cage was because he knew he died a few episodes in.
Then, in the same year, Ali appeared in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, the heartbreaking story of Chiron, a poor gay black boy growing up in Miami with a crack addicted mother. Ali plays Juan, a drug dealer and father figure to Chiron who in one memorable scene reassures the youngster about his fears about his sexuality.
Moonlight went on to break records globally, becoming the first all black cast, LGBTQ film to win the Best Picture Oscar. Ali himself cleaned up during award season, including at the Academy Awards where he became the first Muslim actor to win Best Supporting Actor.
During his acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards the month before, Ali gave a now-viral speech where he called for tolerance, saying: "What I’ve learned from working on Moonlight is we see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves."
Later on stage he is asked about that speech and pauses to make sure he picks his words carefully. "I felt like it would be irresponsible as a Muslim to receive that award [and not speak out] at a time when people couldn’t travel into the country because of who they choose to pray to."
Ali converted to Islam in 1999 after studying different religions at graduate school and finding it "resonated most" with him. "There was an element in the discipline of it that just made so much sense," he says. The decision upset his mother, one of three female ordained Christian ministers in his family, but nows he is just pleased they have moved past the rift.
This complicated spiritual background seems to make sense when you meet Ali. He speaks with grace and a rolling cadence to his voice. There's a poetry in the way he speaks about unpoetic things. When discussing wanting to be challenged in his early acting career, for example, he says he was frustrated because, "there’s all these other colours and notes you want to play".
As pianist Don Shirley in Green Book, he has surely found a role to play these notes in. Ali studied rare documentary footage of Shirley in order to "pick up on some of his rhythms, gestures and postures" and he impressively inhabits a character a world away from the roles we've seen him in before.
From 2017 horror film, Get Out to Spike Lee's comedy-drama, BlacKkKlansman to forthcoming absurdist sci-fi, Sorry to Bother You, films are increasingly subverting genres to Trojan horse important messages about race and discrimination.
From the trailer and many humorous moments in Green Book you could easily mistake it for a classic buddy road movie, but beneath the comedy is a stark message for our increasingly divided times.
"I think it is an extraordinarily effective way to deal with issues that are traditionally very serious," Ali says when I ask about the tone of the film. "If you think about Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle, people go to see them because they know they’re going to have a great time and laugh, but they also know underneath that that they’re going to hear a message that has real substance in it. You set the audience up for being able to have a good time but also slip a message in there that they need to hear."
Ali thinks it is important to widen the audience appeal of the film so we're not just "preaching to the choir". He adds, "I think we really do live in a time of cultural and political echo chambers and so it’s very difficult for ideas to cross-pollinate."
It's an extraordinary performance balancing comedy and candour and one for which Ali is already being discussed as a serious contender for the Best Actor Oscar. But before he has to think delivering another viral speech, in January he will release the third season of True Detective.
When asked about the forthcoming season he reels off an impressively spoiler-free line saying, "I play the lead detective in a story that takes place over several decades in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the eighties and they’re trying to solve a crime." Later, however, he can't resist dropping the headline-ready quote: "I kid you not the finale episode is the best piece of television I’ve ever read in my life."
On stage, he is asked: "is there a weight on you, going into awards season this year, after your previous wins?'"
Ali shakes his head, then chuckles.
"No weight."
'Green Book' will be released 9 February 2019
