Mahershala Ali was born Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore on February 16, 1974, in Oakland, California, and raised in nearby Hayward. He attended Saint Mary’s College of California on a basketball scholarship, playing as Hershal Gilmore, and graduated in 1996 with a degree in communication. A staging of the play Spunk turned him toward acting, and he earned a master’s degree at New York University’s graduate acting program in 2000.
He came up through television, with early series work on Crossing Jordan and The 4400, before his first major film role in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). On television he played Remy Danton in House of Cards, a performance that drew an Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actor in a drama series in 2016, and Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes in Marvel’s Luke Cage.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ali the Oscar for Actor in a Supporting Role for Moonlight in 2017, for his performance as Juan, a Miami drug dealer who becomes a surrogate father figure. He won the same category in 2019 for Green Book, as the pianist Don Shirley. Ali became the first Black actor to win two Academy Awards in the same category and the second Black actor to win multiple acting Oscars.
His television work continued to draw recognition, with Emmy nominations for True Detective in 2019 and Ramy in 2020. In 2020, he also won an Emmy as an executive producer of We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest. In a 2017 interview, he credited teacher Kenneth Washington and a summer training opportunity at the Guthrie with helping him regain confidence while studying acting at NYU.
