“For me, the arts — writing, and later on acting — became a place where I could speak to feelings and ideas I couldn’t articulate in my everyday life. I need structure to be fulfilled and happy. His body language, posture, voice, everything.”Mortensen’s transformation was widely praised, partly because he put on so much weight — critics love it when an actor fattens up. I thought I’d be incredibly fortunate to have this actor to build the show around.” So he went back and rewrote the script with Ali in mind. He holds himself to a very high standard, but he doesn’t judge.”Perhaps this is why he elicits such reverence from his friends. West LA is more flashy or commercial. Some of the sweetest parts of “We Are the Dream” are the introverted kids, painfully shy, who work for weeks on their performances with the guiding patience of their teachers, and the joy on their faces when they receive applause.“Those are the ones I always cry over in the doc,” Ali said with a smile. When Ali saw some footage from New York director Amy Schatz’s documentary, he leaped at the chance to help produce the film with his production company, Know Wonder.The hour-long documentary premiered at the Fox Theater on Tuesday, Feb. 11, in a celebratory event that included Ali and his wife, producer Amatus Sami-Karim, and their 3-year-old daughter, Bari Najma Ali, as well as Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, Schatz and several of the kids and parents who are in the film. And they’re very similar as actors, by all accounts. “It’s not just that I look similar, it’s because they knew my father’s experience, how he struggled,” he says. Martin Luther King Jr. I want to go home and deep listen now too. “And that really resonated with me because I know I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now if I didn’t have some sort of experience in that oratory space a little bit, from early on growing up doing some things in the church.“I would write poems and perform them or share them a little bit. Having to navigate your own anxiety and your own fear and know that the courage to get up in front of people is a muscle that has to be exercised.“To get that lesson now is something that will stick with these kids as they age, as they move into the workforce, as some of them become more politically active, as some of them work more in their communities or with their families, this is the type of thing that will continue to encourage them to try and locate what is just within them and really try and communicate that, and graciously.”Ali, who went to St. Mary’s College and lived in Berkeley as recently as 2011, said he has his ear to the ground for great Bay Area stories to tell. But the prayer was like resonating in my body.” So he went from Gilmore to Ali, and started praying five times a day. It made an impression on Ali, who took that lesson to heart with the same purpose he brought to his religious practice. Perhaps inevitably, they split when he was three; Ali recalls his mother leaning on the dresser and crying, “He’s gone, your father’s gone.” Soon afterwards, Ali was at his father’s apartment, watching him win first prize in the dancing competition on He lived with his mother, who cut hair for a living, while his aunties raised him with his maternal grandmother, and then later on, a very tall and strict stepfather. I want to ask him how that change feels on the inside, but he sighs. Ali had no time to prepare. All he knows is, he’s going to do his bit. ESQUIRE, PART OF THE HEARST UK FASHION & BEAUTY NETWORK With the assistance of their teachers, they write their own poems and essays, applying King’s philosophy to modern problems.“The big surprise for us is we thought we were making a film about a competition. As hard as it was, the loss gave him the kind of clarity only mortality can — that he would follow in his father’s footsteps to New York and become an artist himself, albeit an actor, not a dancer: “I saw how short life can be, and that you have to go for whatever it is you want in life.” He made it onto the graduate programme at New York University and within a year had moved to the city to emulate the father who’d inspired him, but was not alive to see it. Like Barry Jenkins, the director of This is what they say, to a man: that Ali is respectful, kind, elegant, a gentleman, humble, disciplined and unreasonably talented. Where would I like to sit? Back then he was just a kid looking for attention. And it amounts to this: of course the changes are positive, but let’s see if they stick. “In interviews like this, they talk about their process and life, but black actors are always talking about diversity, where the culture’s at, where it’s going. He’s all smiles and manners. “And now they see me where I’m at and they know it’s connected.” As though his life hadn’t changed radically enough in his twenties — with his father’s death and his move to New York to act — Ali converted to Islam in his last year of graduate school.
School night, you know.“I saw it, and I was really inspired by this little secret in the Bay Area that (Schatz) was shedding light on, and just the impact that it seemed to have on these kids from the standpoint of challenging them, putting them in a somewhat uncomfortable space, but seeing them walk away with their self-esteem elevated,” Ali said.