Tuesday was a big day for New Yorkers as they trekked to the polls to vote in the Democratic New York City primary for mayor.

The nail-biting race saw New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani take the lead and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo ultimately concede, and the election’s official outcome will come in July.

Until then, here’s more about Mamdani and his surprising connection to Hollywood.

His mother directed the 1991 film, ‘Mississippi Masala’

Mamdani, in addition to having a growing political influence and a modern approach to campaigning, is the son of Mira Nair, an Indian American filmmaker who boasts an almost five-decade-long career. She directed the 1991 film Mississippi Masala starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury.

As USA Today reported, Nair met Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, while location scouting for the film. The pair went on to marry and eventually relocate to New York City.

Nair has also directed movies like 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, which earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations; 2001’s Monsoon Wedding, which earned a BAFTA nomination; 2006’s The Namesake; and 2016’s Queen of Katwe, starring David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o.

Zohran Mamdani convinced his mother to pass on directing a Harry Potter film

As Mamdani has been celebrating a big step in his bid for mayor, a 2018 clip of Nair with Vir Sanghvi at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2018 has resurfaced online. In it, she discusses how she was in talks to direct the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but her son convinced her to pass on the project.

“I was deep into making The Namesake at that time. And The Namesake, this beautiful novel by Jhumpa Lahiri — really, I had suffered my first death in my family of my mother-in-law who was like a mother to me, and an unexpected death of medical malpractice — completely blew me away,” Nair says in the clip. “And I was deep in that melancholy, and that’s what inspired me to make The Namesake because Jhumpa has written in it of this terrible melancholy of losing a parent in a foreign country, which is exactly what I was experiencing. So I was deep in the throes of — like, almost a month away from shooting The Namesake. And they offered me Harry Potter. And I thought I had to take these meetings because my son had learned to read from Harry Potter. And I went to several meetings and I was in the throes of it, and then I was very troubled to be able to give up my own film.”

Nair turned to her son for advice on which project to pursue. A then 14-year-old Zohran encouraged her to follow her passion.

“He said to me, ‘Mama, many good directors can make Harry Potter. But only you can make The Namesake.’”