Tough Break

The Wire’s meanest thug tries to make it beyond the box.

By Michael Freidson

Michael Kenneth Williams, a.k.a. The Wire’s Omar, the charismatic gunslinger who robbed the hardest gangstas in inner-city Baltimore, who strutted around in a signature trench coat, who was gay yet hard-core street, is on the roof of midtown’s Second Stage Theatre, welling up. Shit, I made Omar cry.

“Man, thank you, first of all,” he says, after I tell him his fans are rooting for him, post-Wire. We’re sitting in patio chairs and he looks away from me. “I’m in a transition right now, personally, and I needed to hear that. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Maybe he was tired from the night before, out partying with friends (“We started at this bar downtown, and then I don’t know what happened…”). But more likely, he’s suffering from every actor’s dream—and nightmare. For six years, he’s been Omar—beloved by white journalists, real-life gangbangers, homosexuals and Barack Obama. And now…what? He’s got a few small roles in big fall movies, yet… “I just want to keep this going,” says Williams. “It’s scary, I’m not gonna lie. To come this far, I don’t want to go back.”

God forbid. Raised in the projects of East Flatbush, Williams, 42, smoked his first joint at age nine. By 12 or 13, he was a drug addict and “totally lost.” By 17, he had moved on to coke, staying awake days in a row. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “By the time I got out of hand with it, I was getting high for a whole other reason,” says Williams. “I was self-medicating. A lot of things I was dealing with, a lot of issues. I was never a tough guy—never a thug—but I had a real good knack for stepping in huge turds of shit. Around my 25th birthday, within one month, I had been arrested for grand theft auto twice and got cut in my face”—he runs his finger over his famous scar—“and my throat almost slashed.”

You don’t need more than that to wake up.

“Actually, I needed a couple more things to wake me up,” he says with a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I did. I sleep hard.”

Rehab followed, but it was Janet Jackson who saved his life. Inspired by her Rhythm Nation dances, Williams got a job dancing with Kym Sims, who had a hit with “Too Blind to See It.” “I was like, I’m coming!” says Williams. “I’d sneak into Broadway Dance Center and work on my routines and they’d kick me out. It was the first thing that held my attention.”

He transitioned into acting, taking thug parts in TV shows and music videos. By 2002, he was ready for Omar. “I knew I had an ace in the hole, which was Omar’s sexuality: I was like, This dude is gay. I’m going there! The writers would write: ‘Omar rubs his head. Or Omar caresses his lips.’ And I’m like, ‘When does Omar fuck his dude?!? When?!?”

Beloved as they are by fans, the Wire cast members have struggled since the show ended earlier this year. “The reality of the fact is, it’s over, it’s basically back to the drawing board,” says Williams. “That’s what I was talking about earlier, with my transition. I’m at a point in my life—you work so hard, do so much, I realized it’s been four years since I’ve had my own place, I have a family that I need to start to spend more time with—it’s like, is this really going to sustain me? As we all know, I dropped out of college. There’s no papers on the wall. There is no plan B, really.”

This fall, he’s in the Spike Lee joint Miracle at St. Anna (Sept 26) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, costarring Viggo Mortensen (Nov 14)—“Viggo is the coolest cat. The dude has a chocolate fetish. We’re on this postapocalyptic set and he’s handing out chocolate.” Williams was also slated to star in the Off Broadway drama Wig Out!, about a family of drag queens, until he quit the day after this interview “for personal reasons.”

That was faintly disturbing news, given his raw emotionality in our talk. But it brought to mind the last thing we spoke about: Williams’s work with the Christian Love Church in Newark. “I am just now learning the real process of loving myself,” he says. “If I can get myself to a place where I truly love me, I can help other people. I could easily get off track, but I just got back in the fold and it feels good.”

NEXT: Smile for the camera Happy-Go-Lucky star Sally Hawkins turns in an Oscar-worthy role, playing the most unusual character: a content one.»

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