Mahershala Ali Confirms He’s Not Doing Marvel’s ‘Blade’: “They Didn’t Want to Do It”

Mahershala Ali won’t be Marvel‘s Blade.

The two-time Oscar winner confirmed to GQ his reboot of the iconic vampire slayer isn’t moving forward, and he made it clear he thinks that Marvel dropped the ball.

“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not,” Ali said in the new interview. “For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on … Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie … But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”

The comments follow Marvel’s boss Kevin Feige telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he was distressed about the company’s inability to get the project going.

“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” the executive said.

Marvel originally announced a Blade movie starring Ali in 2019. The company brought aboard Bassam Tariq to direct, but he left the film in 2022, just two months before the project was to begin shooting. Ali and Tariq have now re-teamed for a different project, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Tariq tells GQ that Ali actually did training as Blade during pre-production.

“Mahershala is an athlete, and I saw the way he uses a sword on Blade,” the director said. “The first time he was doing sword practice on Blade, the stuff coming back was incredible

“As a former athlete, I’ve dreamed of doing my own stunts,” Ali added. “I was very excited to do stunts in Blade and trained for a long time for that, so it was a huge relief to get to put that work to use [in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother] … When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me. And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade. In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level.”

Ali previously won best supporting actor Oscars for Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018).