Mahershala Ali Turned Down Roles, Moved His Family and Blew Out His Knee for Blade

Mahershala Ali has officially reached the “actually, since you asked…” stage of discussing Marvel’s abandoned Blade movie, and I support him airing every last grievance. Marvel announced Mahershala as its new Blade at Comic-Con in 2019. Seven years later, there is no movie. There was never even a completed shoot. Instead, the project burned through writers and directors, was repeatedly delayed and eventually disappeared from Marvel’s release calendar. By 2023, it had reportedly already gone through at least five writers.

Now Mahershala has explained what those delays actually cost him.

During GQ’s One More Question, Zach Baron pointed out that despite winning two Oscars, Mahershala has made surprisingly few films over the past eight years. Mahershala immediately brought up Blade.

He said he spent a year training for it. He learned sword fighting and multiple martial arts. He trained so hard that he “blew” his knee out. He uprooted his family and moved them to Atlanta because production was supposedly about to begin.

Then Marvel just kept postponing it.

“I’m still training,” he recalled. “I literally moved, uprooted my family, moved to Atlanta. We’re there waiting to go, and they just keep pushing it back.”

And here is the part that really gets me: Mahershala says he was turning down other jobs while all of this was happening because Marvel “owned my schedule, basically.”

That changes the entire conversation about Blade. Marvel did not simply waste its own development money. They tied up an actor during an incredibly valuable stretch of his career while repeatedly assuring him that this enormous movie was happening.

Kevin Feige has already called failing to get Blade made with Mahershala one of his biggest professional failures. Mahershala’s response? “I agree with him 100%… He should feel that way.”

Because Marvel somehow had a two-time Oscar winner volunteering to play a vampire hunter, and spent seven years trying to figure out what to do with him.

Sir. He is Blade. He hunts vampires. We had already cracked this code in 1998.

The happier ending is that some of Mahershala’s ridiculous Blade training finally got used. He reunited with original Blade director Bassam Tariq for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, and Mahershala says he was able to dust off those fighting skills for the film. He now describes the collapse of Blade as something of a blessing because it freed him to make more original work.

Still, I would love a list of every role he said no to while Marvel kept telling him, essentially, “any day now.”