Mahershala Ali, Photo Credit: Peggy Sirota
"Within a few years he was training with some of the best actors in the country at the NYU graduate theater program. The culture shock was intense: It was here, he said, that he began to feel 'the edges of my natural talent. “I wasn’t feeling very good at [acting],'he says, 'and therefore it started to affect how I felt about myself.' He was also in New York for the first time without his father.
Then fate intervened in the form of Kenneth Washington, a visiting professor and the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater. At the end of the school year, Washington selected 12 students from across the country to join the elite Guthrie summer training program. Ali didn’t even try out.
'I didn’t audition for it because I didn’t feel like I’d get it,' he says. Washington, though, wasn’t going to take no for an answer—he held a spot open and waived the audition requirement. After that summer, Ali says, he returned to N.Y.U. “confident and clear” about his future as an actor." — Mahershala Ali, GQ Magazine