Mahershala Ali in Tears in London Recalling Moonlight Boy

Mahershala Ali broke down in tears on stage in London on Saturday as he remembered the young boy at the centre of Moonlight.

The moment came during his Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival, hosted by Amon Warmann, according to Variety. The session was listed by the BFI for 17 October 2026 at Curzon Soho Cinema, with a 75-minute runtime, and listed as sold out.

Ali had been talking about the dinner-table scene in which young Chiron asks Juan, the drug dealer played by Ali, whether he sells drugs. Asked what gave the film its lasting power, he paused. He wiped away tears. "Sorry, just need a second," he said.

He told the audience he built Juan from a man he knew growing up. The man was like an uncle to him. They played basketball together, and the older man also worked as a substitute teacher.

That man was later arrested and sent to prison while Ali was in college. Ali said he carried that memory into the role.

Moonlight, which recently marked its 10th anniversary, brought Ali the first of his two Oscars. He won the second for Green Book, in which he played pianist Don Shirley opposite Viggo Mortensen. He keeps both statuettes in a cabinet, out of his sight line, so he could get back to work.

Work came fast. He went straight from Green Book into True Detective with only a week or two off to play detective Wayne Hays across three timelines. The older Hays meant 80-hour weeks. It meant four hours in the makeup chair from 3:30 a.m. The shoot ran seven months. His daughter was a year old at the time.

He also looked ahead to animation. Ali voices Aaron Davis in the Spider-Verse films, including a version of the character from another universe who appears at the end of Across the Spider-Verse and returns in Beyond the Spider-Verse. Asked how he tells the two Aaron Davis variants apart, he said he did not want to give anything away and had to be careful. Pressed on whether he had finished recording, he joked: "I might not even be in it, man!"

Two other voice and screen roles came up in London. He voices bandit leader Brendan in the animated Wildwood, which is screening at the festival. In the action thriller Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, he plays Latif, a devout Muslim father and contract killer, and had three or four days to learn the fight choreography.

What makes this stand out is how plain Ali kept it. No speech about legacy. Just a pause, tears, and a story about someone he knew as a kid.