“You come at the king, you best not miss,” he tells his enemies after a failed attempt on his life – a line sold, as always, with Williams’s indelible combination of menace and charm. Photograph: © Copyright 2002-2008 Home Box Office Inc. ‘You come at the king, you best not miss … Williams in season three of The Wire. “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase,” he tells a lawyer whom he views as just as much a part of the drug world as he is, wearing an impudent and phallic tie over his bomber jacket. He is given some of the show’s most important lines. “Omar comin’!” kids yell as he arrives whistling his unexpectedly threatening signature tune The Farmer’s in His Den (known in the US as The Farmer in the Dell). The iconography created for the character was uniquely memorable. “A man got to have a code,” he says: “Don’t get it twisted, I do some dirt too, but I never put my gun on no one who wasn’t in the game.” In one memorable moment, he erupts with fury when he is attacked while taking his grandma to church on a Sunday morning, having believed “ain’t no need to worry, ’cause ain’t nobody in this city that lowdown to disrespect a Sunday morning!” A Robin Hood-style antihero who makes a living robbing drug dealers, he represents a point of idiosyncratic moral certainty in an amoral world. “He’s not my favourite person but he’s a fascinating character.” “That’s not an endorsement,” the then-presidential candidate added prudently.
#Omar the wire professional
Omar went on to become the moral centre of the programme – to the extent that Barack Obama famously felt able to describe this professional thief as his favourite character. “And it opened up a dialogue, definitely.” “Omar definitely helped soften the blow of homophobia in my community,” Williams – who died on Monday aged 54 – said in 2019 of the East Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. “That sort of intimacy was not shown much then, but Mike insisted, and it breathed life into the character.” “I remember somebody immediately saying, ‘There go our ratings’,” Ed Burns, co-creator of The Wire, told the New York Times. Photograph: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for ABA ‘A great American actor’ … Williams poses in Brooklyn before the 2021 Critics’ Choice awards in March.
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