Mahershala Ali and filmmaker Bassam Tariq were all set to make Blade, a Marvel film centered on the titular anti-hero, when the project spectacularly fell apart before being removed from Disney’s line-up in 2024.
The project, which Ali officially walked away from in July, left him prepared and ready to perform action on-screen. Luckily, the connection he formed with Tariq laid the groundwork for their new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, which allowed Ali to show the physicality he has been perfecting for years.
“I think [the movie] spoke to me so deeply,” Ali said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “It offered up an opportunity to engage and commit to the type of difficult I want to commit to because this work is gonna be hard regardless — whether you’re in a good film or a bad film. [The film] was something that was very exciting to me. It asked all of us to go very deep emotionally, but it also checked sort of an action, movement, physicality box for me that I had been really yearning to really invest energy in.”
In Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim and contract killer who travels across Houston in an effort to protect his three children following the death of his wife. He is confronted with a series of dangerous obstacles, including John Cho’s Haun Yoon, an Army veteran and militant church leader who is determined to destroy what he deems are great evils.
The action film was partly inspired by Tariq’s experience as a new father and “ not feeling like you’re enough as a provider,” the director told THR. Ali said that he was struck by Tariq’s vision when he first read the script.
“Sometimes, you read things and energy starts going off,” Ali said. “It just resonates in a way where you feel called to it — almost as if you don’t even have a choice. You just know that when you read certain things. If anything, it was just more of me having questions about how Bassam was gonna stitch very different worlds together. … You just had to dive in and trust. He is an amazing filmmaker and he was able to, in my humble opinion, stitch that world together in such a fascinating way.”
Ali is also set to star in the season two of HBO’s action-packed series Task, which began filming in July. The Oscar winner said that Emmy-nominated show allowed him to expand on the action techniques he wanted to perform on screen.
“ I’ll just say that there is some physical work in that as well,” Ali teased. “It’s challenging in a very different way, but I’m getting through it.”
Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother premiered Sept. 12 at TIFF before being released by Amazon MGM.
