Williams, who was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment on Monday at the age of 54, was not a classically-trained actor. “Mike is a beautiful man,” The Wire co-creator David Simon told The New York Times in 2017, “but a gangster he is not.” Williams brought a solemn intensity to the characters he portrayed. In Williams’s first appearance as powerful Rikers Island inmate Freddie Knight in The Night Of, the emptiness in his eyes bore the sheer inhumanity of prison. As the bootlegger Albert “Chalky” White on Boardwalk Empire, his stare nearly froze Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson in place during the former allies’ surprise reunion during the Prohibition-era drama’s final season. In his breakthrough role as The Wire’s renegade stick-up man Omar Little, he murdered Idris Elba’s deceitful Stringer Bell with a look before dispatching him with the shotgun he kept on tilt. His frigid stare, intensified by that trademark razor blade scar stretching across his face, pierced the screen and cut straight to your core -and that glare was integral to some of his best work. Williams would’ve buried every audience six-feet deep upon first glance.
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