‘Wire’ actor Michael K. Williams found dead in Brooklyn apartment
NEW YORK – Michael K. Williams, who famously played righteous stick-up man Omar Little in HBO’s “The Wire,” was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Sept. 6.
A relative found the 54-year-old actor dead in his apartment on Kent Ave. in Williamsburg about 2 p.m., cops said.
Police found drug paraphernalia inside his apartment, sources said. The city medical examiner’s office will determine his cause of death.
In a 2015 interview with “The Wire” creator David Simon, former President Barack Obama described Omar as “my favorite character on my favorite show.”
Williams spoke openly about his struggles with drug addiction, both before breaking into show business and during his time on “The Wire.”
“I was playing with fire,” Williams told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2012, describing how he’d score drugs in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. “It was just a matter of time before I got caught and my business ended up on the cover of a tabloid or I went to jail or, worse, I ended up dead. When I look back on it now, I don’t know how I didn’t end up in a body bag.”
Williams was an acting powerhouse — and a powerful voice for social justice and police reform off-screen. He was the co-star of the SundanceTV series “Hap and Leonard” and filmed several scenes in Cedartown in 2017 for the show’s third season.
The East Flatbush native started his show business career dancing in music videos but on his 25th birthday a bar fight in Queens changed his trajectory. He was knifed in the fracas, leaving him with a distinctive scar down his face.
“Things changed immediately after that.” Williams said in a 2004 interview for the NPR series “My Big Break. “Directors didn’t want me just to dance in the videos any more. They wanted me to act out these thug roles.”
That led rapper Tupac Shakur to cast him as “High Top,” the brother of Shakur’s drug kingpin character in the 1996 film “Bullet.”
His breakthrough role came in the 2002 HBO series “The Wire.”
He played Omar Little, a shotgun-toting openly gay stick-up man who lived by a code: “I ain’t never put my gun on nobody who wasn’t in the game.”
He became a mainstay in some of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas, playing Chalky White in “Boardwalk Empire” and, most recently, winning a Critics Choice Award for his performance as Montrose Freeman in “Lovecraft Country.”
“Shocked and saddened by the death of Michael K Williams. One of the nicest brothers on the planet with the biggest heart,” wrote fellow “Wire” actor Isaiah Whitlock Jr. on Twitter. “An amazing actor and soul. May you RIP. God bless.”
Williams used his fame as a platform to speak up for criminal justice reform, working with the ACLU as an “ambassador for ending mass incarceration” and with the nonprofit NYC Together.