Michael K Williams lives on in Omar Little of ‘The Wire’
• Actor will be remembered for his performance in what many deem to be the greatest TV series of all
Tributes from across the world flooded social media and news sites on Monday after the news that 54-year-old actor Michael K Williams had been found dead in his New York apartment, reportedly as the result of a drug overdose.
The actor will be best remembered for his performance as one of bingewatch television’s most indelible creations, The Wire’s Omar Little: the gay, scar-faced, shotgun-toting, duster-wearing stickup man who calmly plied his trade robbing drug dealers and emerged as a Robin Hood figure bound by his own hardto-disagree-with moral code. For the five seasons of what many deem the greatest show in television history from 2002 to 2008, Omar was perhaps the closest thing to a hero in a series that did not have one.
When Omar met his demise from a small boy’s gun in a convenience store in episode nine of the final season of The Wire, the collective gasp at the shamelessly blasé extinction could be heard around the world and was picked apart in minute detail for days afterwards.
Omar had been the one character everybody could get behind — his laconically delivered aphorisms about “the game” ringing true for those looking for some hope in a universe where nobody was free of sin, few could be trusted and hardly anyone got out of its grim streets unscathed.
In a show carefully controlled by writers who conceived it as a modern-day Greek tragedy set in the ruthless Baltimore drug world, no character upended their plans or the world of the story as much as Omar. That was all down to their choice of the actor who played him.
Williams was born in 1966 in the Flatbush Gardens projects of New York to a Bahamian seamstress mother who raised him in the absence of his estranged US father. He discovered a talent for dancing as a young man and began his showbiz career as a dancer for George Michael and Madonna, touring the world and developing an addiction to cocaine that he would struggle with throughout his life.
While out drinking at a bar in Queens on his 25th birthday, Williams tried to save a friend from robbers and was rewarded with a scar that would change his life.
He was cast in the 1996 Tupac Shakur film Bullet after the rapper saw a Polaroid of him in a production office. A succession of small “thug roles” followed, including in Martin Scorsese’s 1999 Bringing Out the Dead and a notable cameo in an episode of The Sopranos. After a single audition, during which his inability to handle a shotgun left co-creator Ed Burns so unimpressed that he almost did not get the role,
Williams landed the part of Omar Little in The Wire.
Omar was originally conceived as a secondary character who would have a small arc of six or seven episodes before being killed off. But Williams’s performance and his demand that the writers foreground the character’s hinted-at homosexuality, led to him becoming a writer and fanfavourite pivotal to the development of the show’s Dickensian multicharacter social drama.
In scene after scene, Williams drew, as he would throughout his career, on his own experiences and those of the people he grew up with, to shape his character into an unforgettable TV creation.
He stole the show from his first appearance, where the revelation of his distinctive face is preceded by cries of “Omar coming!” and the whistling of the children’s song The Farmer in the Dell, through to his sardonic take down of a sleazy drug-dealer’s lawyer whom he dismisses in a court appearance with, “I’ve got the shotgun. You’ve got the briefcase”. His warning to Barksdale drug family Svengali Stringer Bell was stark: “If you come at the king, you best not miss.”
Even then presidential candidate Barack Obama declared that his favourite character in The Wire was Omar, though to his regret — as he would later admit — Williams was too high to speak to the future president when they met during his campaign.
After The Wire, Williams relapsed and battled his addiction but he continued to create unique characters in Boardwalk Empire, When We Rise, Hap and Leonard, When They See Us and Lovecraft Country, earning five Emmy nominations along the way.
He was a committed fighter for equality and justice in the wider world, serving as an ambassador for the American Civil Liberties Union, speaking out against the prejudices of the US prison system and carving a path for the empathetic representation of black gay characters on screen.
The shock that met news of his death is far more tragically final than the death of his fictional creation could be, but Omar will forever remain in the world even though Michael K Williams is no more. As actor and director Travon Free wrote in a Twitter tribute: “Somebody tell God, Omar is coming.”