![]() ![]() Think of his perfectly delivered line after a shootout, “…you come at the king, you best not miss.” Amidst the violence and the bloodshed, here was Williams speaking his dialogue in such a way that you couldn’t help but laugh. Oh sure, Omar could menace, but there was always some sly bit of humor attached to his depiction of the hard-knock life, whether it was him whistling “the farmer in the dell” while robbing a dealer’s stash house, or just a little extra emphasis on certain vowels in his lines. He was simply a great actor given the perfect role and was able to imbue a tremendous script with more than what was even on the page. is nothing like Omar when you hear his interviews. Williams fit into the role so naturally and so fully-formed as an actor that you could have almost believed that he was just playing a version of himself.īut he wasn’t playing himself. His portrayal absolutely shattered that stereotype, and in doing so, forever upended our notion of onscreen masculinity. Unlike so many characters that preceded Omar in crime stories, Omar was gay, but he was not weak. I had seen plenty of crime series and films about drug dealers and the cops who try to catch them, but I had never seen anyone like Omar before. Nowhere is this more clear than in his portrayal of Omar-the gay, drug-dealer-robbing street criminal with “a code” on David Simon’s all-time great inner-city drama The Wire. That scar that split his face in two (Williams was once victim of a “wilding”) should have been a barrier to an onscreen career, but it was not for Williams. He appeared in numerous music videos and shared the stage with Madonna. Yet, I still find myself hung up on how to begin to talk about this remarkably empathetic actor. ![]() Williams, as the width of his too-short career is remarkable, and the depth of his performances, bottomless. Usually I go one of two routes: I’ll either create a sort of travelogue through a performer’s career or I’ll focus more narrowly on one or two roles that I think are most representative of that actor’s peak.Įither option should work perfectly fine for Michael K. ![]() If you write enough celebrity obits, you develop a formula of sorts. I’ve been staring at the blank page on my computer screen for several minutes. ![]()
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