Mahershala Ali

On the porch in Leave the World Behind (2023), Mahershala Ali makes a polite conversation feel exhausting. His G.H. Scott has to prove he owns the house to Julia Roberts’s Amanda, who does not want to believe him. We felt weary on his behalf, because his patience suggests he has had to do this sort of thing before. Sam Esmail’s film later spends too long explaining what it means, but Ali has already made this encounter painfully clear.

House of Cards (2013) brought him wider notice before Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018) established him as a major film actor. Juan, the drug dealer who becomes a surrogate father in Moonlight, could accommodate both his calm and his ability to make a difficult man sympathetic. Green Book put his dignity and vulnerability to work as Dr. Don Shirley. The shift to his first film lead in Swan Song (2021), playing Cameron and Jack, gave him more of a film to carry.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) makes particularly good use of his voice. He plays Uncle Aaron alongside Brian Tyree Henry as Miles’s father, Jefferson Davis, and their family scenes give the action a reason to matter. Ali helps make Miles’s attachments feel personal, so his choices carry some weight beyond the next set piece. Our reservation about the film is that its busiest action sometimes crowds out these people.

Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) gives him far less to work with as boat captain Duncan Kincaid. Gareth Edwards finds patience and scale for the dinosaurs; David Koepp’s script supplies Kincaid with a loss when a scene needs weight. Ali is warm, but there is little in the part for that warmth to attach to. We would not recommend choosing a film simply because he is in it: even an actor this capable needs more than a job description to play. Start with Uncle Aaron, and let the dinosaurs wait.