Speaking with GQ to promote his latest film Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother—a film he made with the director once attached to the Blade project, Bassam Tariq—Ali shrugged off his Marvel experience when asked how it all went wrong. “That’s a Kevin Feige question,” he said to GQ‘s Zach Baron. “They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar-winning actor under contract, and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for them. I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it didn’t. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was—Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career, and I agree.” When Baron reiterated Feige’s “loser” comment during the interview, Ali, sitting with the confidence of one who bears no responsibility for an infamous botch job, concurred. “I agree with him. I agree with him one hundred percent. One hundred percent. He should feel that way. I agree.”
Ali has cause to be annoyed with Feige, saying he moved his family to Atlanta for the film’s production and trained “so hard I blew my knee out.” “I spent a year training,” he said. “I was just waiting for them. [They were] pushing it back, pushing it back, pushing. I’m still training. I’m training. I’m learning sword work. Name the martial art; I’m training in it. And I literally moved, uprooted my family, moved to Atlanta. We are there, waiting to go. And they just keep pushing it back, pushing it back, pushing it. It doesn’t happen. And then it’s a strike.” (Blade was already neck-deep in delays before the 2023 Writers Strike, though that seems to have been the guiding force behind the film’s fatal stake through the heart.) And while Ali would have been justified in continuing to make Kevin Feige feel bad for blowing Ali’s chance at playing a cool daywalking vampire hunter, he opted to take the high ground from there. “I will say, to sort of bring it back around to actually more how I’m feeling in the moment, is: I’m actually grateful it didn’t happen,” Ali said. “For Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, I got to unite with a director by the name of Bassam Tariq. We were originally supposed to work on Blade together. That didn’t happen, but we were able to use that training and the time we spent together and put it to good use on Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”
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