Mahershala Ali is making the awards rounds for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, and on Saturday, November 14, 2026, he used the stage at Deadline's Contenders Film Los Angeles to talk about the hardest part of his role: playing a man of deep faith who kills for a living.
Ali sat on the panel at the DGA Theater with writer-director Bassam Tariq, co-star John Cho and composer Rafiq Bhatia of Son Lux. In the film he plays Latif, a devout Muslim father of three in Houston who works as a contract killer. After his wife dies, Latif tries to square his beliefs with his work while caring for an infant, and gets pulled into his employer's war with an extremist group led by a viral preacher, played by Cho.
What Ali Said About Faith and Certainty
Asked how he made peace with Latif on the page, Ali said the risk with religion sits in how people read it. A faith argues that its view of the world is the right one, he explained, and that confidence becomes a problem when the reading behind it is wrong.
Then came the line Deadline put in its headline. The danger, Ali said, is that people "sort of end up believing in their own righteousness." He sees that in Latif, who believes fully in what he is doing. He also sees it in Cho's preacher, and said the two men are more alike than they look, with one humbled and the other lifted up by something close to a miracle during the story.
The Night That Inspired the Movie
Tariq told the room the film grew out of a scare in his own family. Two days after his wife gave birth, she was rushed to the emergency room with an infection, and their newborn son would not keep formula down. Tariq strapped the baby to his chest and went looking for breast milk around New York City. His wife recovered. What stayed with him was a cab ride home with a crying baby who only settled once his father stopped scrambling and simply held him.
Cho admitted he worried about being a distraction. He did not want audiences seeing Harold and Kumar in a story this heavy, and said long, honest sessions in a room with Ali and Tariq got him past it.
From Blade to Latif
The film is a reunion of sorts. Tariq was once set to direct Ali in Marvel's Blade before leaving that project, and Ali later walked away from it too. Tariq wrote Latif with him in mind, and the sword work Ali trained for ended up on screen here, with a machete.
The title comes from a hadith in which a man asks the Prophet Muhammad who most deserves his good treatment and hears the same answer three times: your mother.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother played the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in select theaters on September 25 and expanded nationwide in October through Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios. Giancarlo Esposito, Tramell Tillman, Tiffany Boone, Abubakr Ali and Laith Nakli round out the cast. Deadline says video of the full panel will be posted Monday.
