Age: 52
male
Mahershala Ali (/məˈhɜːrʃələ/ mə-HUR-shə-lə; born Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore on February 16, 1974) is an American actor. He has received multiple accolades, including two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019, and in 2020, The New York Times ranked him among the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century. After pursuing an MFA degree from New York University, Ali began his career as a regular on television series Crossing Jordan (2001–02) and Threat Matrix (2003–04), before his breakthrough role as Richard Tyler in the science fiction series The 4400 (2004–07). His first major film role was in the David Fincher-directed fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). He gained wider attention for supporting roles in the final two films of the original The Hunger Games film series and in House of Cards, for which he received his first Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Ali won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performances as a drug dealer in the drama Moonlight (2016) and as Don Shirley in the comedy-drama Green Book (2018). He is the first Black actor to win two Academy Awards in the same category and the second Black actor to win multiple acting Oscars. Ali won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program for executive producing We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest (2020). In 2019, he played a troubled police officer in the third season of the HBO anthology crime series True Detective, and in 2020, he starred in the second season of the Hulu comedy-drama series Ramy. He was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for both performances. Ali has also played Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes in the first season of the Netflix series Luke Cage (2016) and voiced Aaron Davis in the animated films Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). Description above from the Wikipedia article Mahershala Ali, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
The novel opens with Dr. Marina Singh reading a letter from Dr. Annick Swenson to Marina's boss and secret lover, Mr. Fox, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Vogel. The letter reports the death of Dr. Anders Eckman, Swenson's colleague at a drug research site in the Amazon rainforest. When Eckman's widow begs Marina to find out what happened, Mr. Fox agrees to send Marina to the Amazon. Mr. Fox's other motive is that Dr. Swenson was given a blank check to conduct research into a new miracle drug, and refuses to inform him of her progress. Finding Dr. Swenson proves to be difficult. Marina flies to Manaus, Brazil, and finds that the only people who know Dr. Swenson's whereabouts are an Australian couple named Jackie and Barbara Bovender, who are tasked with hiding her whereabouts from the outside world. Eventually Dr. Swenson surprises Marina in Manaus, and they travel in a boat piloted by a young deaf boy named Easter to the rainforest research site, near the encampment of an indigenous people called the Lakashi tribe. The women of this tribe bear children until the end of their lives, an ability they gain from eating the bark of an endemic tree called the martin. The drug whose research Vogel is funding is one that will prevent or undo menopause and allow women to give birth throughout their lives.
