Played Omar Little on ‘The Wire’
Actor Michael K. Williams, who created one of the most beloved and enduring characters in a prime era of television, died Monday. Williams portayed Omar Little, the rogue robber of drug dealers on “The Wire.”
He was found dead Monday afternoon by family members in his Brooklyn penthouse apartment, New York City police said. He was 54.
His death was being investigated as a possible drug overdose, the NYPD said. The medical examiner was investigating the cause of death.
Little, a “stick-up boy” based on real figures from Baltimore, was probably the most popular character among the devoted fans of “The Wire,” the HBO show that ran from 2002 to
2008 and is re-watched constantly in streaming.
Williams was also a ubiquitous character actor in other shows and films for more than two decades, creating another classic character as Chalky White in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” from 2010 to 2014, and appearing in the films “12 Years a Slave” and “Assassin’s Creed.” He is up for an Emmy for his role in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country.” A win at the Sept. 19 ceremony would be his first in four nominations.
As Little, he played a criminal with a strict moral code, known for taking advantage of a reputation for brutality that wasn’t always real.
Williams, who had worked in tiny TV roles and as a backup dancer for hip-hop acts before landing the role, had said that reputation started to stick to him in real life.
“The character of Omar thrusted me into the limelight,” he told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” in 2016. “I had very low self esteem growing up, a high need to be accepted, a corny kid from the projects. So all of a sudden,
I’m like, Omar, yo, I’m getting respect from people who probably would have took my lunch money as a kid.”
With smoke from his cigarette often wafting through the darkness, the character would whistle the melody known to American
children as “The Farmer in the Dell” and British children as “A Hunting We Will Go” to ominously announce his arrival.
And he spoke many of the show’s most memorable lines, including, “a man gotta have a code” and “all in the game yo, all in the game.”
The character also broke TV ground as an openly gay man whose sexuality wasn’t central to his role.
His “Wire” co-stars, and many others, paid him tribute Monday afternoon.
“The depth of my love for this brother, can only be matched by the depth of my pain learning of his loss,” Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William “Bunk” Moreland and had many memorable scenes with Williams, said on Twitter. “An immensely talented man with the ability to give voice to the human condition portraying the lives of those whose humanity is seldom elevated until he sings their truth.”