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On the job, Williams would say that he always kept his mess at “shoe level,” but he also showed a willingness to talk publicly about that mess: addiction, sexual abuse, homelessness. Maybe he showed such sensitivity on the screen because he knew how precarious it all was. Many of us have struggled with drugs and alcohol, or know family members or friends or co-workers who have Williams was not immune. That he did it all the while grappling with his own battle with drugs is a wonder. The actor Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William Moreland, known as Bunk, on “The Wire,” said that Williams has opened up “a window to a world of men that we pass by or don’t know about.” More than portraying these men, Williams’s genius lay in his willingness to inhabit the lives that could have been his. Williams the actor allowed him to make the most fearless character on “The Wire” also the most vulnerable. In one role, he managed to be a Black Robin Hood, a tender friend and lover and a ruthless avenger with a sardonic wit that challenged ideas of what is permissible in the lives of Black men on the screen.
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“Omar’s coming” was both a warning and an admission: There are some of us who walk in this world unafraid of who we are. The role that followed - Omar in “The Wire,” a gay Black man who wielded a shotgun against his enemies - gave visibility to a form of Black masculinity rarely seen on TV.
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Williams as Omar in “The Wire.” Paul Schiraldi/HBO And then when Tupac Shakur saw Williams’s face in a grainy Polaroid on some production company’s wall a few months later, the scar that at one time threatened to ruin his life catapulted him into a career as a thespian. house clubs to touring with Missy Elliott, Madonna and George Michael, and choreographing Crystal Waters’s 1994 hit “100% Pure Love.” Williams danced like the last drink being poured into a glass, both urgent and unbelievably graceful, more in control than any man has a right to be. Raised by a strict Bahamian mother in Brooklyn’s Vanderveer Estates, he loved to dance. it’s why people look at this and see a thing of beauty.” He continued, “Had I taken the other route, I think it would have made me ugly - from the inside.” It might also have led him down the paths of many of the characters he played, men whose lives were often ruined by the inability to resist the brutality and violence that defined their worlds.īut in Williams’s case, the scar that split his face in half led to unexpected opportunities. And I honestly believe that because I let it go. “I knew that I did not want blood on my hands. “I opted out,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011. That Williams could have retaliated and didn’t matters. By 25, he had a drug habit and had stolen a couple of cars, and though he wouldn’t label himself a “bad boy,” he said of his early 20s, “I had a way of always finding myself in trouble.” In a bar in Queens on his 25th birthday, an argument escalated to the point where a man spat a razor blade out of his mouth and sliced Williams’s face, leaving the scar that would become his unmistakable signature. He was a window into the lives of men we rarely choose to see.