Michael K. Williams remembered for his compassion after demise

Michael K. Williams, best known for playing shotgun toting drug dealer Omar Little in the HBO crime drama The Wire, was remembered by his colleagues as an actor with a special talent for humanizing the characters he portrayed, bringing his own experience as a Black man growing in New York to his roles.

Williams, who also won praise for his roles in Boardwalk Empire, Bessie and Lovecraft Country, was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment on Monday, the New York Police Department said. He was 54. An investigation into the cause of death is underway.

“The depth of my love for this brother can only be matched by the depth of my pain learning of his loss,” Wendell Pierce, who played Detective Bunk Moreland in The Wire, wrote in a Twitter thread.

Williams had “the ability to give voice to the human condition portraying the lives of those whose humanity is seldom elevated until he sings their truth,” Pierce said.

The Wire was a TV series set in Baltimore that tells the story of the narcotics trade through the perspective of criminals, police and the people caught up between them. Critics praised Williams for his portrayal of Little, a homosexual drug dealer at war with his rivals.