Michael K. Williams, Survivor Who Played ‘Omar’ on ‘The Wire,’ Found Dead of a Heroin Overdose at 54
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“If it looked real to you, it felt real to me.” Michael K. Williams to Charlemagne tha God, on acting.
Michael K. Williams, who was popularly known for his character Omar on The Wire, was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Sunday of a heroin overdose according to the NYPD.
He was 54 years-old.
New York Times: As Omar Little on The Wire, David Simon’s five-season epic on HBO that explored the gritty underworld of corruption, drugs and the police in Baltimore, Williams played perhaps the most memorable character on a series many consider among the best shows in television history.
As a swaggering lone wolf in a story largely defined by continuing battles between the police and various crime bosses and crews, Omar was one of prime-time’s preeminent antiheroes in a TV era defined by them. He was also gay and openly so in the homophobic, coldblooded world of murder and drugs, a groundbreaking portrayal of Black masculinity on television. “I saw a lot of homophobia in my community,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times in 2019. “Omar definitely helped soften the blow of homophobia in my community and it opened up a dialogue, definitely.”
Mr. Williams grew up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he said he had never envisioned a life outside the borough. But before he was 30, he had parlayed his love for dance into dancing roles with the singers George Michael and Madonna, and choreographed and performed in the video for Crystal Waters’s hit single, “100% Pure Love.” He then landed his first acting opportunity when he caught the eye of Tupac Shakur.
At 25 years old, Mr. Williams got the scar that became his signature physical feature and that helped to define him as an actor. He was spending his birthday at a bar in Queens when a man slashed his face with a razor blade during a fight. After that, directors no longer wanted him as a backup dancer; they wanted him in “thug roles,” he told NPR in 2014.
When Tupac saw a Polaroid of him in a production office, the rapper decided that he was the person to play his character’s brother in the 1996 film Bullet, in which Tupac starred opposite Mickey Rourke.
After playing a drug dealer in Martin Scorsese’s 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead, Mr. Williams landed a small role in an episode of The Sopranos, playing a loving father living in the projects who agrees to help hide a son of a deceased mafia boss. With that job, he felt as if he had arrived as an actor, he told Vanity Fair in an interview last year. It wasn’t lost on him that he was one of the few people of color on the show, and typically, those characters ended up “floating with the fishes.” But he viewed it as monumental that he had played a Black man on the show who was not a “pawn that got killed off.”
Then came The Wire. Just before he landed the role, Mr. Williams has described himself as “lost,” in debt and borrowing money from his family to live. He was in the living room watching television when his episode of The Sopranos came on and, watching himself onscreen, he realized he was sitting around wasting his talent.
“I went back to my mom and I said, ‘You know what, I think I need to give show business one more shot,’” he told Vanity Fair.
Son of Baldwin aka Robert Jones Jr. lamented: “I loved you, Michael. I loved you as much as Black men are allowed to love in a loveless place. I’m trying to determine if that means I didn’t love you at all. And if I didn’t, will the rest of my life be in search of your forgiveness? Honestly? I can think of no better use of the remainder of my time here, considering how little of it any of us have left.” #MichaelKWilliams
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BossLogic wrote: Rest in power MKW, honestly hurt to hear the news today, The Wire being on of my all time favs and it wouldn’t have been anything for me without Omar……time, we always overlook it. ????
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NewJersey.com reported: During the height of his fame, Williams battled addiction and lived a double life in some of Newark’s most dangerous neighborhoods — doing drugs “in scary places with scary people,” he told NJ Advance Media in a profile from 2012. During breaks from shooting, Williams would retreat to the Newark area, looking for cocaine and weed, he said.
“I was playing with fire,” Williams said at the time. “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 got cleaned up after a friend dragged him to the Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington, where he met Rev. Ronald Christian. Williams and Christian instantly connected. “He never judged me,” Williams said at the time of Christian. “He always asked, ‘Are you okay?’ He loved me until I could love myself.”
Page Six: Michael K. Williams’ final social media post was a clip of fellow New Yorker Tracy Morgan passionately urging friends and fans “Don’t cry for me” while talking about surviving a fatal limousine wreck in 2014.
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Williams dedicated himself to helping keep city kids safe from violence when the five-time Emmy nominee wasn’t acting on hit TV shows. “Brooklyn is mourning one of its native sons,” the borough’s president and Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams tweeted shortly after news broke about the East Flatbush native’s passing. “Michael K. Williams was a generational talent and a tireless advocate for social justice. As Omar in The Wire, he once said ‘sometimes who you are is enough.’ Michael was always unabashedly himself — and he will be deeply missed,” Adams wrote.
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Watch Williams on The Breakfast Club in 2016.
