As Spider-Man soars to a record shattering weekend at the worldwide box-office, Mahershala Ali is lamenting the fact that his long-gestating Blade movie never even got off the ground.
During an in-depth interview with GQ to promote his forthcoming action drama Your Mother Your Mother, the academy award winning actor didn’t hold back when discussing his casting as the Daywalker, which was announced with some fanfare during a surprise Comic-Con appearance in 2019, only to go through multiple directors, rewrites, and production delays, before a stake was driven through the heart of the project earlier this year.
Your Mother Your Mother finds Ali teaming up with Bassam Tariq, who at one stage was set to direct Blade. He told GQ “When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me.” Ali added “I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade. In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I.”
The Moonlight and True Detective star was perhaps a little less positive in his takeaway from the Blade debacle as he went on to say “When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that, and I’ll take this. No offense to them. I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on. Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
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In the wake of casting announcements such as Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider and David Jonsson inheriting the iconic Black Panther role, this feels all the more frustrating for anyone who was eager to see Mahershala Ali become Marvel’s half-human, half vampire antihero. Guess we’ll have to make do with that voice cameo during The Eternals post-credits sting – and maybe even another appearance from Wesley Snipes after his Blade return in Deadpool and Wolverine?
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