Chris Evangelista quoting Mahershala Ali:
“I was like, ’See, we existed in this space. In the ’60s and the ’70s. State police officers,’” Ali said. “I was like, ‘I think your story would be served, I think the story would be improved in this case, if this lead character was black.’” Ali also convinced Pizzolatto that by making the lead character black, the story could explore racism in Arkansas
I still have yet to see Moonlight1, but even still Mahershala has been great in the two major roles I have seen him in between House of Cards and Green Book.
I’m actually looking forward to True Detective S3, which is something I did not expect to say after only getting through the first episode of S2.
More importantly, I’m really glad to see someone like Ali fight for a role originally written for a white actor. I guess I can understand the reservations given the time period this is set in, but hopefully this is a small step to more roles being open to diverse casting and not pigeonholing characters from an initial screenplay.
As a side note, /Film has been starting to find its footing with articles. I used to only follow them for film news and trailers. They’ve been writing longer articles like this more awhile, but it’s only been this past year where it seems like something has clicked and I’ve been actually enjoying more of their non-news pieces.
I really need to remedy this.↩︎