No./18 Farewell to a smallscreen titan

[IN MEMORIAM] Remembering the late MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS with his five most iconic television performances

1 OMAR LITTLE THE WIRE (2002-2008)

Some of the most memorable scenes from The Wire, David Simon’s superlative, sprawling, Baltimore-set crime drama, begin quietly and ordinarily. It’s just another day in the projects. Hustlers on street corners, kids playing in the street. And then the relative peace is disturbed by a single whistle. When Omar Little starts chirping ‘A-hunting We Will Go’, the smart thing to do is scarper.

It’s rare that one character can inspire such fear and respect among nearly all who encounter him, but in the hands of Michael K. Williams, it never feels unearned. He is a formidable, utterly charismatic presence in his breakthrough television role as a shotgun-wielding stick-up artist, a modern-day Robin Hood who lives his life by robbing the ’hood. His character was originally conceived for just seven episodes; he ultimately appeared in 51, across all five seasons.

Williams — who had only a handful of acting credits before being cast — brought his own experiences of growing up in the projects of Brooklyn to the role, and admitted the lines between him and Omar “got a little grey”. But his performance enriched and deepened the character, imbuing tenderness and warmth to a cold-blooded killer — a man who looks after his grandmother, and holds a special place in his heart for Honey Nut Cheerios. It was Williams who encouraged the writers to stop tiptoeing around Omar’s sexuality (“I knew that dude was gay,” he later said), and who opted to have an unscripted kiss with co-star Michael Kevin Darnall in an early episode, surprising his director.

Omar was a queer person in a world that rarely depicted them, and in a community dominated by cops and drug dealers, he existed outside of it all, abiding only by his own strict personal morality. “A man’s gotta have a code,” he memorably repeated, and despite living violently, Omar never harmed any outside of ‘The Game’, frequently collaborated with police, and even chastised others for using swear words.

It is these unique qualities, and the fearless, authentic rendering from Williams, that won Omar a legion of fans, from his Wire co-star Wendell Pierce (hailing Omar as one of the most “iconic characters in the history of American television”) all the way up to President Obama (who declared Omar his favourite character on the show, before qualifying, “That’s not an endorsement”).

When talking about a show like The Wire, hyperbole is never too far away. But it is not overstating it to say that, among a crowded ensemble, his was the best character, and the best performance, in arguably the best TV show of all time. More hyperbole, perhaps? You may disagree — but you come at the king, as Omar once put it, you best not miss...

JOHN NUGENT 2 CHALKY WHITE BOARDWALK EMPIRE (2010-2014)

The Wire’s Omar will always be Williams’ defining role. But it was another HBO crime drama that gave him the opportunity to flex his range, with a part that took him on an equally textured journey. In Terence Winter’s Prohibition-era epic Boardwalk Empire he played Albert ‘Chalky’ White, a far cry from

The Wire’s lone-wolf stick-up artist. “Omar was a hunter,” Williams told Vulture in 2010. “Chalky is a businessman. He’s a gangster. He plays a certain game that Omar just did not belong to.”

Where Little coolly stalks the periphery of the action, White stands defiantly at its centre, a shrewd Atlantic City power-broker who guarantees the Black vote to whomever

does best by him and his people. He is an impeccably tailored family man who owns one of the finest homes in the City and is eventually rewarded for his loyalty to kingpin Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) with his own sparkling nightclub.

Williams never wanted Chalky to be “just an angry Black man”, he said. But Chalky does struggle with his own perceived limitations. His illiteracy and darker skin both contrasted with his lighter-skinned, educated wife and children, not to mention his nemesis, the wily Dr Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright). There is always a tension in Williams’ poised portrayal, pulling at Chalky beneath that slick exterior. He may have risen higher than most men of his background could ever dream, but he will always be, he believes, the “field Negro” among “house Negroes” — reflecting, Williams once noted to Rolling Stone, “a very intense, very real relationship in the Black community”.

Despite his crimes, there is a bitter sense of tragedy to Chalky, which Williams wore as well as his suits. As he warns Narcisse just before his foe’s men execute him during the final season, “All a dream to begin with. Ain’t nobody ever been free.”

3 FREDDY KNIGHT THE NIGHT OF (2016)

When we meet Williams’ Freddy Knight, he’s perched, eagle-like, on the second floor of the Riker’s Island cell block, gazing out over the inmates, master of all he surveys, and laying eyes for the first time upon Riz Ahmed’s newly processed Naz. Later, when one of the guards tells Naz that “he” wishes to see him, there’s little doubt as to who is the real authority in the prison. The pair’s first encounter is pregnant with menace and yet, despite managing to be terrifyingly threatening with just a wrapped piece of veal, Williams comes across as far more than a clink-flick archetype.

A presence at once compassionate and entirely sinister, his former boxer turned hardcase exudes an uncompromising ruthless streak ( just ask the rapist whose throat he opens), but as with so many of Williams’ roles, it’s tempered by a depth of humanity and genuine tenderness as Freddy shields Naz from the worst of prison life and, slowly but surely, builds him into someone equipped to survive life on the inside. Ahmed’s memories of filming the show speak of a man both generous and profound, who gifted him with not only his favourite jacket, but with his most useful piece of acting advice: “Stop thinking about it, try dreaming about it.”

4 BOBBY MCCRAY WHEN THEY SEE US (2019)

There are no easy roles in Ava Duvernay’s When They See Us, least of all Bobby Mccray. As the father of Antron — one of the five teenagers unjustly accused in the Central Park Jogger case of 1989 — he naively bullied his son into signing the confession that would send him to prison for years, before abandoning his family. It would have been easy not to feel any sympathy for a man who makes such bad choices, but Williams adds complexity to what might have been a simple role.

Mccray is ultimately ruled by his fear, and Williams brings that internal turmoil to the fore in palpable ways when he talks to his young son. The conversation starts as a whisper — “I need you to do what the police want you to do” — before morphing into full-blown screaming. Once Antron gets out of prison he shines again as Bobby, now sick with kidney disease, pathetically tries to make amends for his actions. His redemption never comes, and perhaps that’s just as well. But as Williams looks forlornly at his son, who is now lost to him, it’s impossible not to feel empathy for him. It’s a performance that’s entirely deserving of the Emmy nomination it received.

5 MONTROSE FREEMAN LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (2020)

From the moment he first appears on screen, tunnelling up from underground captivity, Montrose Freeman is the return of the repressed, embodied: traumatic pain, personified. That’s a hoary old horror trope, but Williams’ light touch made it young again. In Lovecraft Country, whatever you bury deep — be it ‘daddy issues’, or taboo sexuality, or traumatic memories from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre — will resurface. And in the case of the disco-dancing, chiffon- shirt-wearing Montrose, this means a chance at liberation.

Fittingly, the time-looping reconciliation between Montrose and his estranged son

Tic (Jonathan Majors) doesn’t end (or begin) when the series does. Rather, it’s part two of a cosmic, inter-textual trilogy: In 2017’s TV mini-series When We Rise, Majors had his big break playing the young Lgbt-rights activist Ken Jones, also played by Williams in later life in the same show. And in the upcoming Western The Harder They Fall, Majors will play real-life African-american cowboy Nat Love, who was first played by Williams in writer-director Jeymes Samuel’s 2013 sorta-prequel They Die By Dawn. Samuel has said Nat Love’s facial scar in the latter film is a tribute to his much-beloved friend: “He was the genesis… His belief in me made everyone else believe.”