My favorite scene in The Wire is partially built on a lie. It’s the second-season sequence in which Omar Little is put on the witness stand and shady lawyer Maurice Levy tries to assault his credibility. Omar turns the tables on Levy by declaring that they’re both part of the same hypocrisy, famously declaring, “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game, though, right?”
Were Omar Little merely a gangster with a code, he’d be one of a half-dozen characters fitting that description on The Wire alone. He’d be an archetype. And yes, there’s a rigor to the way Omar approaches his interactions with the various characters in his sphere, different rules applying to dealers and civilians. But in a show that’s about capitalism and the way the American Dream and the drug game intersect with deadly consequences, Omar is driven by more than the almighty dollar. Most of Omar’s decisions in the series stem from the violent torture and murder of his boyfriend Brandon. For all his calculations, it’s clear that revenge and love — love for another man in a milieu in which Omar’s sexuality makes him even more of a threat to his adversaries — and impetuous desire are Omar’s real motivations.
In all his messy glory, Omar Little is the creation of David Simon, but he was embodied by Michael Kenneth Williams in a way that it’s hard to imagine any other actor achieving. He’s malevolent and mythic in size, yet he’s instantly empathetic, and human to his tortured core. The call of “Omar’s coming,” uttered by corner boys whenever Omar, with his trademark trench coat and shotgun, came around — sometimes whistling “A-Hunting We Will Go” like a self-styled Big Bad Wolf — was a warning to scurry. For viewers, it becomes a more eagerly anticipated pronouncement. If Omar was coming, that meant badass swagger, clever one-liners that never felt forced, and some of the most consistent emotional through-lines in the series.
Williams, who was found dead Monday, age 54, built a career on the complicated task of being an indispensable part of some of the greatest ensembles in television history, while at the same time being an actor who you couldn’t look away from. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. A great ensemble is a complex network of meshing pieces. Sure, you might have favorite characters within an ensemble, but anybody who’s too dynamic runs the risk of pulling focus from the collective to the individual. Williams didn’t do that.
Gallery: Emmys: Limited Series Nominees Talk Fight Scenes, Lessons Learned and Getting Spoofed on ‘SNL’ (The Hollywood Reporter)
Emmys: Limited Series Nominees Talk Fight Scenes, Lessons Learned and Getting Spoofed on ‘SNL’
‘I May Destroy You’
IMay Destroy You is both a case of art imitating life and life imitating art. Michaela Coel’s masterful HBO limited series — which centers on a British writer named Arabella (Coel) who is dealing with the fallout of sexual assault, along with myriad other subjects — is rooted in her own experiences to the point that it’s tricky to tell where Bella stops and where Michaela begins. Conversely, Coel’s writing also has carried into real life — both in her close relationships with onscreen best friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) and in the fact that fans regularly approach her in public to express their gratitude, as they do to her character in the show. One year after I May Destroy You debuted to sonorous acclaim, the series picked up nine Emmy nominations, including acting, writing and directing nods for Coel. The showrunner-star shares with THR her insights on social media, balancing work and play, and what it’s like to wear so many hats on a production. I May Destroy You is often billed as a work of autofiction. Is it important that other people know where Michaela ends and Arabella begins? No, because I don’t even know where Bella [stops] and where Michaela begins. When I was writing, it [was like] there was my reality, Michaela, Arabella and then the writer, me. I looked at both the lives, including my own, as if they were separate from the writer. At some point, my life gets boring and isn’t very televisual. And so then Arabella begins. Most of the show is fictional, so I don’t even know if it legitimately falls under the category of autofiction. I’ve noticed some friends that only started watching the show a few weeks ago, they think people are real that aren’t real in the show, so I tell them, “Oh, this person isn’t real,” and they’re like, “No, don’t say that, you’re breaking my heart!” Arabella struggles a lot with writer’s block and writes in bursts of inspiration. Is that reflective of your own writing process? Yes, definitely. I’m not one of these writers that writes every day for the sake of writing every day like it’s exercise. I think it would probably benefit me to try and be that writer, but I’m not. I need to carve out time and work until I’m lost in the thing [before] I’m finally enjoying it. I need the wave of inspiration. I’m definitely a lot like Arabella in that regard. The series came out during lockdown, so I imagine you were mostly getting feedback through the internet and social media. A year later, have you had the chance to have any face-to-face conversations about it? Actually, most of my finding out about the response was through meeting people, either on the street [when] I run every day or walking to [go] pick up a toilet roll. I don’t really use social media. I looked at Twitter — I’m talking like three or four times — because I’m used to, from my previous experiences, reading people’s tweets [and running] into a tweet that hurts [my] feelings. I don’t like to go there because I don’t like when my feelings are hurt. So it was on the street, you know, cycling — you stop at a traffic light, and there’s another cyclist, and they’ve seen the show. I’ve had really beautiful interactions with people that way. I’ve stood on the street with people and we’ve cried together. Continue reading. — Harper Lambert
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‘Mare of Easttown’
Only in the third decade of the 21st century could an HBO murder mystery, starring Oscar winner Kate Winslet, drop on a random Sunday in April without months of fanfare heralding its arrival. That Mare of Easttown managed to come out of nowhere before its successful seven-week run is proof positive that there is now far too much programming to even pretend to keep tabs. But isn’t it nice to be surprised? Created and written by screenwriter Brad Ingelsby (The Way Back) and directed by frequent HBO player Craig Zobel (The Leftovers, Westworld), Mare of Easttown tells the story of the eponymous police detective, already beleaguered by personal tragedy, trying to solve the murder of a local girl. Its popularity was almost instantaneous, garnering a Saturday Night Live spoof and luring 4 million viewers in its finale weekend. Now, with the show up for 16 Emmys, TV newcomer Ingelsby tells THR about the lessons learned on his first series — and his thoughts on the calls for a second installment of the limited series. Assuming you came into this with a familiarity with the murder-mystery genre, what about the genre did you want to lean into and what did you want to avoid? It’s a mix of hugging the tropes of the genre. As a writer, you have to acknowledge and accept that viewers come into a murder mystery to be guessing. You have to satisfy those needs and expectations that bring an audience to the table. This isn’t necessarily a subversion of the genre, because many other mystery shows have done it, but the idea was we really wanted to do a deep dive into characters, community, shared history and trauma. There’s a procedural element to this show, but hopefully we’re also nimbly bringing viewers into the lives of the people in the community in a way that you get wrapped up in the characters emotionally. Anecdotally, it seems like viewers liked the ending of Mare. Do you think there’s too much emphasis on endings these days, and the idea of “sticking the landing”? You always ask yourself, “What’s the takeaway?” right? Not that the show was trying to preach or be about one life lesson. That’s not interesting to me. There’s too much emphasis on endings, probably, but it’s a reality that I was acutely aware of. If you spend even hours in a world, in a mystery, and the goal is “Let’s let you get wrapped up and twisted in knots” — when you get the reveal, it’s not satisfying. I think what viewers are looking for when you talk about sticking the landing — and who knows if we did, there’s going to be people that say you didn’t — is just a story that’s well-told and doesn’t leave you feeling cheated as an audience member. It’s not about “If you blinked in episode one, you missed the guy in the back of the bar who was the killer.” It’s about the audience walking away feeling like the end was a fitting conclusion to the hours that came prior. Continue reading. — Mikey O’Connell
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‘The Queen’s Gambit’
Despite breaking Netflix viewership records and raising star Anya Taylor-Joy to the A-list, The Queen’s Gambit‘s path to success was as unlikely and hard-won as that of its protagonist. Executive producer William Horberg does not exaggerate when he says, albeit jokingly, that it “took 30 years to get paid.” From novel to seven-part Netflix series, the story of orphan chess prodigy Beth Harmon (Taylor-Joy) and her battles with addiction, rival players and a slew of condescending men changed hands many times before it ended up with writer-director Scott Frank. Only two people saw the project through from beginning to end: co-creator and EP Allan Scott and Horberg. Horberg recently spoke with THR about how his Emmy-nominated original song came to be, working with the world’s greatest chess players and why he thinks the show struck such a chord. How did you become involved with the project? In the early ’90s, [producer and screenwriter Allan Scott] acquired the rights to Walter Tevis’ novel. Eight or nine years later, author Michael Ondaatje told me that this was one of his favorite books, [which] he read every couple of years to remind himself how to write. That was such an incredibly powerful endorsement. I started to track down the rights, and lo and behold, I found out that they were controlled by my old friend Allan. [When] I reached out to Allan around the year 2000, he already had several attempts and different talents interested. We just kept running into the same wall in the marketplace. Because of the nature of the story — it’s [a period piece], there’s a lot of big crowd scenes, it takes place not only all around America but in several foreign countries as well — it just wasn’t perceived as commercial by people who were financing movies. Allan came very close to making it with Heath Ledger, [who] was going to make it his directorial debut, and then, tragically, he passed away right before they were about to start preproduction. At that moment, it kind of felt like maybe this thing was just not meant to be. The game-changer was the advent of streaming content, [which] brought back the limited-series format as a viable option. Scott Frank had made Godless, a very successful show, and Netflix was looking to extend their relationship with him. He remembered The Queen’s Gambit, and he called me up and said, “I’ve always kept that in the back of my mind as a story I’d love to tell.” How did you know the novel would make for good television? I was hooked from the first page. There was just something uncanny about Tevis’ talent to immediately clue you in to a situation and characters. You’re walking in Beth’s shoes, and you care so desperately about her. It had such a compelling personal, emotional narrative. I was very convinced that if we could break through the barriers of prejudice against seeing the material as having commercial potential, we could have something special. Having said that, nobody can claim that they ever, in their wildest dreams, could imagine that [the show would become] the global cultural phenomenon it became when it dropped last year. Continue reading. — Harper Lambert
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‘The Underground Railroad’
After Barry Jenkins’ second feature, Moonlight, earned best picture at the 2017 Academy Awards — where he also scored a best adapted screenplay win, shared with Tarell Alvin McCraney — the director likely could have picked anything he wanted as his follow-up. He turned to American literature, first adapting James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk (the film would earn Regina King a 2018 Oscar for best supporting actress) and then to Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. The latter, now nominated for seven Emmys, including outstanding limited series, is much larger in scale and scope than Jenkins’ feature films. The 10-part Amazon project follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a young enslaved woman who escapes a Georgia plantation and heads north via the abolitionist network — which in the series is depicted quite literally as a vast nation-spanning system of trains that delivers the formerly enslaved to safety in Canada. The result is a Swiftian journey that is more magical realism than historical fiction. As she advances north, Cora discovers that each state of the Union has its own culture, mores and rules — and she is pursued by a slave catcher named Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), elevating the stakes of her escape as she narrowly avoids danger at every turn. Jenkins, also nominated for directing the limited series, spoke to THR about the particular challenges he took on as a showrunner for a television series, his approach to bending the episodic format with varying episode lengths and how cinema is actively evolving into an experience that no longer requires watching something in a theater. How did you get attached to the project? Was the book something that you read on your own, and you decided you wanted to adapt? I’d always been a fan of Colson’s writing. When it was first published, I had already preordered it on Amazon — I wanted it the minute it dropped. I read it even before Moonlight premiered at Telluride [in September 2016], and I just really loved it. In my first conversation with Colson, I said, “Look, I don’t want to do this as a feature film. I think it has to be a limited series.” And he agreed. Was it daunting to do a multipart series after making three features? Yeah, it was. I had been a part of Sundance’s episodic lab, with a project that I ultimately tried to develop with the late Chadwick Boseman. In that lab, you go through the whole process from beginning to end to create a season of television. From that experience, I was staffed in the writers room of Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers for season two. So, I got a couple experiences watching people do it, and I did have some understanding of what the difference would be from making, say, a Moonlight versus being the showrunner for a writers room, with a 116-day shoot of roughly 40 to 50 pages [an episode]. I was kind of prepared for it, mentally. Continue reading. — Tyler Coates
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‘WandaVision’
The next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the most lucrative entertainment franchise in the world, quietly started in January … with a TV show. WandaVision, a meditation on grief disguised as a genre-bending ode to several decades’ worth of TV sitcoms, laid the groundwork for not just the coming barrage of Marvel series on Disney+ — but several MCU films to follow. It did that, care of creator Jac Schaeffer, while simultaneously pulling some praiseworthy performances from leads Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany. The project is up for 23 Emmy nominations, more than any other limited series, including mentions for its two lead performers and supporting scene-stealer Kathryn Hahn. Its haul is all the more impressive when one considers that Marvel’s entire film franchise, with $23 billion in global box office to date, hasn’t approached that level of prestige (save maybe 2019 Oscar best picture nominee Black Panther) over 24 films. Schaeffer spoke with THR about her cerebral spin on the characters, thriving within the parameters of the superhero studio and the challenge of making big fight scenes make sense. What kinds of conversations did you have about how to make Wanda, who admittedly hasn’t gotten the most screen time in the films, a real draw for wider audiences? I think it’s a little bit of a product of [the fact that] Wanda’s appearances in the MCU prior to the show were always very fraught. And if not fraught, if not in the middle of a battle, then they were quite melancholy. That thread of heartache, grief and intensity is true to her character in the comics, and it’s certainly the backbone of WandaVision as well. But this premise afforded an opportunity to see both Wanda and Vision be funny and silly and charming and domestic and mundane. I love that. I’m always interested in the most unexpected framing for a familiar character or really a familiar story. With 23 nominations, WandaVision has more than any other limited series — but the genre seems to be more competitive than comedy or drama this year. This field, it’s like the Pyrenees, a big mountain range of just icon and staggering talent after icon and staggering talent. It is incredible what’s happening in the limited series space, and I am deeply humbled to be in this company — especially the actor-creative hybrids. I May Destroy You was like an earthquake for me and my understanding of what writing and personal writing can be. The thing that was so shocking and groundbreaking, for me, was what the ending to a story can be. That series, especially, has stayed with me in a way that I aspire to it affecting my work forevermore. Continue reading. — Mikey O’Connell
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6/6 SLIDES
Maybe it was his early tenure as a background dancer that taught him how to execute his moves, without upstaging anybody, and then make the most of any time he was given to solo, to freestyle, to take a brilliantly written scene, like that back-and-forth with Michael Kostroff’s Maurice Levy, and add the shading that made Omar simply funnier and more thoughtful than anybody around him.
Do it once and maybe people think you’re just an expertly cast part of one of the best shows in television history. Do it over and over and over again and … Well, that’s you. And that was Michael K. Williams. It isn’t always complimentary to say that somebody steals scenes, but Williams was a complementary scene-stealer, somebody who made the most of whatever they were given and, at the same time, enhanced the whole.
Look at Boardwalk Empire, where, in a series populated by some of the most colorful and larger-than-life mobsters in actual and fictionalized history, Williams’ “Chalky” White was generally the most compelling counterpart to Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson. Chalky, like Omar, was a tremendous character not necessarily because you rooted for him (though you did) or ever wanted him to become the focus of the series (which you often did), but because in all his work Williams gave the impression that even when he wasn’t onscreen, his characters were living interesting and emotionally rich lives. He did it in The Night Of. He did it in When They See Us. He did it most recently in Lovecraft Country, where, once again, he built a portrait of nuanced Black queer masculinity within a genre that hasn’t traditionally been a vehicle for such stories.
But merely looking at Williams as a great actor who was integral to great ensembles is reductive. In SundanceTV’s Hap and Leonard, Williams more than proved his ability to be a leading man, to be an action leading man, to be a romantic leading man, to be a protagonist. He should have had the opportunity, in the past 15 years and in the next 30 years, to do more of that. He should have played more heroes and more villains, should have had the chance to menace James Bond and take down nemeses of his own.
He should have played more lovers. Somebody should have built a part that let him dance (and sing, if that distinctive gruff, urban drawl of his was melodic). He should have had the chance to star in a CBS sitcom and make that CBS sitcom money, because Michael K. Williams was always funny as hell. He should have been able to play the father of a superhero and to also play a superhero (and his part in The Incredible Hulk should have been a real part, not just an edited-out semi-cameo). He should have been able to work with Vice News on more investigative reporting into the causes that interested him. Every writer in Hollywood should have had the chance to put words in his mouth, and he should have had time to come up with more words that he wanted to say.
Williams never won an Emmy in his lifetime, and he was never even nominated for The Wire or Boardwalk Empire. There’s a strong chance, though, that he’s going to be victorious in two weeks for Lovecraft Country. If he does, it will be entirely deserved and entirely heartbreaking.
