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evolved with Intel Evo Platform. Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to episode 96 of Awards Chatter, The Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcast.

I'm the host Scott Feinberg and I'm coming to you from the New York Film Festival

with a special episode presented by the Empire Hotel.

My guest today is Marhercala Ali, a terrific actor who at the age of 42 is finally starting to get the attention

and appreciation he deserves.

Ali is here in the Big Apple with Moonlight, an indie that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last month and instantly became this year's critic Starling.

Adapted from a play and directed by Barry Jenkins, a black filmmaker whose only prior feature was released eight years ago,

it covers a period of 20 years during which a young gay black boy grows into a man in the Miami

area.

Ali plays a strong but quiet drug dealer who in the Miami area. Ali plays a strong but quiet drug dealer who, in the first third of the film, comes to serve

as something of a father figure to the boy, but who has died off-screen by the time the second third

of the film begins. Not since Janet Lee's

exit from psycho has a character's sudden absence been felt more, and that's a

testament to Ali's performance for which he is a strong contender for a best supporting actor Oscar

nomination. Over the course of our conversation Ali and I talk about his own

personal evolution, how he was shaped by the premature death of his father a Broadway actor and then by his time in college to which he arrived on a basketball scholarship but graduated a burgeoning actor.

How landing a small part in the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button helped to pave the way for his breakout role on another David Fincher project, the Netflix TV series House of Cards, on which he appeared as Political Operative Remy Danton from 2013 through 2016.

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