LOS ANGELES — Mahershala Ali is in a sweet spot.
After more than a decade of working steadily in projects such as Treme, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Place Beyond the Pines, the actor earned an ardent fan base for his role as crisp political operative Remy Danton in Netflix's House of Cards. A swing through the The Hunger Games franchise, playing Boggs in the last two installments, didn't hurt, either.
This weekend, Ali, 42, stars in the Civil War drama Free State of Jones (in theaters Friday) as Moses, a slave fleeing the plantation owner who has welded an iron collar around his neck. In the humid Mississippi swamp, Moses meets Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a defiant deserter who leads a mixed-race revolt against the Confederacy.
“Being an African-American, I’ve always wanted to pay homage to those who made it possible for me to have the freedoms that I and so many of us take for granted,” says the Oakland-born actor. “I can go out and vote, and I don’t worry about if I’m going to be killed or lynched as a result of it. And they obviously didn’t have those types of freedoms.”
Most of the tale really happened: After the war, Knight — who had separated from his white wife (played by Keri Russell) — married a black woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and began a long lineage of mixed-race descendants, many of which still live in Jones County, Miss. The third act of Free State of Jones explores the racial tensions following the war. “We’re led to think, even taught, that at the end of the Civil War (and) after Reconstruction, there was kind of a bow tied up and it was all neat and tidy,” McConaughey says. “And it was not.”
Ali disagrees with Snoop Dogg, who called for a boycott of last month's Roots revival. "You can’t lump every story in a time and just say, 'Well, it’s a slave story, we don’t want to see ourselves like that,' " Ali says. "You need these stories because they shed light on how we have gotten to where we are in this moment."
The actor acknowledges that he's started to lean into his growing fame — a little bit. "I just want to act," he says. "We do live in a time where there’s a different responsibility to participate and engage in this process of being known." This fall he stars in Moonlight, a coming-of-age tale set in 1990s Miami. In September, he jumps from House of Cards (Remy won't return in Season 5, he confirms) to Netflix's new Marvel series Luke Cage, playing "a Godfather-type villain" named Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes.
The show, which stars Mike Colter (also black) in the title role, is Marvel's most diverse project to date. “There are going to be so many kids out there who get to see a black man on that screen and aspire to be like him. We didn’t have that. They get to be included.”
The imagery that children see is paramount, he emphasizes. “When I grew up, it was a lie to us that you could be anything you wanted to be. Because we knew we couldn’t be president," he says. "What this generation has is President Obama — he’s a superhero for us. And I think that might be hard for people to really embrace and understand.”
