After Wilson Fisk in Daredevil and Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, the bar has been set high for the villains in the Marvel/Netflix series, but Marvel’s Luke Cage – debuting Friday on Netflix -- comes out of the gate with a notable antagonist via Cornell Stokes, AKA Cottonmouth, played by Mahershala Ali (The 4400, House of Cards, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and 2). A Harlem crime boss, Cottonmouth has an uneasy dynamic with his cousin, Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard – in her second Marvel role this year after her unrelated character in Captain America: Civil War). A local politician on the rise, Mariah is aware of Cottonmouth’s criminal actions and tolerates them to a point, but the two are often also at odds with one another – while Luke Cage’s actions also have consequences for both of them.
I spoke to Ali and Woodard about joining the world of Marvel, the way Cornell and Mariah’s family bond plays into the show, the nod to Mariah’s “Black Mariah” comic book name and more.
IGN: I unfortunately wasn’t able to be at your Comic-Con panel, but I heard from people who were there it went great, and the crowd was super excited.
Alfre Woodard: They were! And they showed some scenes, and I actually— our mics were live. Whatever scene, when I first saw Luke, he did something, and we were in the dark and I went, “Oh s**t!” But my mic was live, and I was hoping they would think it was Simone [Missick]. [Laughs] But there’s a lot of those moments in this show, you’re like “Damn!”
IGN: You’re making this show and production is production, but now you’re presenting it to the world. And you go to Comic-Con, and so much is going on. Does it then hit you, “Okay, this is a big deal. This is Marvel, this is the whole thing”?
Woodard: I wouldn’t say I think of it as a big deal. I always see it as your story hitting the mark. Because I still don’t think of it as— it’s like you, you, you, all those individual people. We tell stories for them to land on people. For people to be moved, changed, touched, whatever. And so I think of it as just like, “Oh my, it’s landed on thousands of people, and they are telling each other about it.” So it creates community. It just happens to be a planet-wide community, but it’s community.
Mahershala Ali: Because I did Mockingjay, it feels very much like stepping into a franchise, right? Because I started in the third [Hunger Games]. I did the third and fourth film…
IGN: Right, so there’s already a fanbase there.
Ali: Right, so there’s already this fanbase for Marvel, and then you get into the Defenders family, so Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and now Luke Cage. So it kind of felt like, “Oh, I’m in the third movie again!” And because there’s already these people who are really familiar with this character in some capacity, and are ready for him to be featured in his own solo piece, and so just to get to contribute to that narrative in a very present way is exciting. And I’m excited that they seem to be so ready for this content and I kind of just wish it was out at this point.
Woodard: Oh my god…
Ali: And it’s hard, because people want… Because of how excited they are about it, there creates this necessity to withhold information and only leak certain things, so it’s extraordinarily hard to talk about. So you end up talking more about the energy of the piece than you actually get to speak about what happens in it. So therefore, you even want it to come out even more so that you can kind of relax and get to engage into specifics about the story. Which they’re all about, that fanbase is all about specifics and how things work and how things function and how the story fits together. All in all, it was wonderful to kind of experience it and get to witness.
IGN: I really like the dynamic of your characters. It feels different than it normally would because they’re cousins - they’re family.
Ali: There’s another layer there.
IGN: There’s another layer there. Did you enjoy playing that and how they are somewhat business partners and criminal partners, in a sense, but they also have this family connection beneath that?
Woodard: Yes. Yes, because there isn’t a villain that wakes up in the morning and does villainous things and says— Everybody is just trying to make order of life around them, and you have partnerships, and so, and especially if you have family, everybody is going to be in it. Some of every kind of person. But by the time you discover all your differences and your different ways of approaching things, you’ve already been weaned together, played together, you already have relationships. And so that’s how we learn how to be in the world, is by learning how to be with family. We learn how to love and how to fight in families. And how to create together, and so I think it paints a very realistic picture that a politician on the up and up has in their family a successful businessman who steps in and out of the gray areas. But you don’t divorce them. What are you going to do? It’s like, none of us would have relations, even with our friends, if we were only doing business or having relationships with people that were...
Ali: On the straight and narrow.
Woodard: ...What we would call morally centered. And what is morally centered? That depends on the person that’s looking.
Continue on as Woodard and Ali discuss the name “Black Mariah” and Marvel’s willingness to include edgier content in their Netflix series.
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