As a kid, you're starting to grow up and want more freedoms. But if you have people who are absorbing and adopting religious principles and teachings, they start drawing these lines and creating confines in their life to live within certain lines.
Mahershala AliMy experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.
Mahershala AliBetween the two [parents], it was a really unique upbringing, I think, especially for where I was from.
Mahershala AliI think how strict my mother's home could be with my mom and my stepfather, there was a fluidity and freedom in my dad's existence that I enjoyed when I was around him, though the responsibility was just different. He expected me to carry myself a certain way without all the rules and confines.
Mahershala AliI grew up in church. My mom's a minister, and my grandmother was an ordained minister. I was always very mindful of the presence of a greater being I call God.
Mahershala AliI went to a mosque in Philadelphia with [my wife] in December 24, 1999. And we we went to this mosque in Philly, and I just had such a strong reaction to the prayer. And I was really emotionally - I felt really grounded at that time. And so to be in this prayer and the imam is doing the prayer in Arabic and I don't understand a word of Arabic but I just remember these tears just coming down my face and it just really connecting to my spirit in a way that felt like I needed to pay attention to that.
Mahershala Ali