Mortal Kombat actor Mehcad Brooks has offered his thoughts on the movie's unexpected relevance in today's political climate.

Speaking with The Root, Brooks talked about Mortal Kombat's surprising timeliness in light of ongoing social movements like Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate. "We've spent the last couple years engrossed in this human equity consciousness where, like, Black lives have begun to matter on a global scale," Brooks pointed out. "We are telling people... I didn't know we needed to have a slogan that says 'Stop Asian Hate' but evidently we do. And then here we have this movie where you have people from all over the world [with] different types of nationalities [and] steeped in diversity where they're coming together and they're unifying for a larger purpose to save the world. Sound familiar?"

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Known for his roles on True Blood and Supergirl, Brooks plays Jax in the new live-action film adaptation of the popular fantasy-themed Mortal Kombat video game series. Created by Ed Boon and John Tobias, the character first appeared in 1993's Mortal Kombat II and would go on to gain his trademark metal bionic arms in 1995's Mortal Kombat 3. In the R-rated Mortal Kombat, Jax bears the same "strange dragon marking" as the movie's protagonist Cole Young and guides him on his journey to discovering his true destiny.

Brooks went on to talk about the film industry's complicity in covering up systematic racism and how "what we've done in Hollywood for way too long is help America launder its own bigotry. African-Americans, we can tell stories from a perspective that no one else can," he added. "Being Black in America [is] a constant state of alchemy, of transmuting anger into purpose or transmuting pain into passion or transmuting sorrow into fuel. And I think that we were systematically withheld from having our voices be heard and expanded upon and I'm looking forward to those days being over and us telling stories, truly American stories, from our own perspective. I think people are really going to take to those stories, not just us."

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Directed by Simon McQuoid and produced by James Wan, Mortal Kombat stars Lewis Tan as Cole Young, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, Josh Lawson as Kano, Tadanobu Asano as Lord Raiden, Mehcad Brooks as Jackson "Jax" Bridges, Ludi Lin as Liu Kang, Chin Han as Shang Tsung, Joe Taslim as Bi-Han and Sub-Zero, Hiroyuki Sanada as Hanzo Hasashi and Scorpion, Max Huang as Kung Lao, Sisi Stringer as Mileena, Matilda Kimber as Emily Young and Laura Brent as Allison Young. The film arrives in theaters and on HBO Max April 23.

Source: The Root