Omar from The Wire – TIME Magazine Interview

Omar from The Wire – TIME Magazine Interview

Here’s an interview that Omar from ‘The Wire’ (Michael Kenneth Williams) did with TIME Magazine. I was trying to interview this guy, but his manager never hit me back. I need to hit up his agent, cause his agent works for Don Buchwald and we all know, Don Buchwald is Howard Stern’s agent.

Btw, I grew up in Maryland… I am trying to think if we actually say “do tell”…. hmm.

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EXCERPT:

How different was your upbringing from the character’s?
Oh, extremely different. As we say in the hood, I’m a stoop kid. I wasn’t allowed to go to the corner. My mother wouldn’t allow that type of behavior in the house. She was very strict about that. I know nothing of what it is to be a gangster. I grew up with gangsters. I have a lot of love for my friends who grew up like that within my neighborhood. But it was clear that I was not cut from the same cloth, and I knew when to stay in my lane and not go overboard and be someone I wasn’t.

Did you do any particular preparation to get yourself into the mindset to portray Omar?
Yeah, I did a lot of research into what it means to be a black man in Baltimore. I wanted Omar to look, sound and feel like someone who was born and raised in Baltimore — not a New York kid trying to portray that. So I had to learn the Baltimore dialects so the writing could sound authentic. They’d write things like “Do tell?” and “How do?” We don’t talk like that in Brooklyn. I thought, What does that mean? “Do tell?” That’s not gangster. But in Baltimore, it is.

What was it like to play an iconic gay character?
If you’d have told me seven years ago that this character was going to warrant this type of attention, I’d have said get the hell out of here. But the fact that this character has been so well-received has been humbling. It’s an honor to be a part of something so beautiful and so revered within the industry.

(Read rest…)

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Permalink Posted in: celebs, howard stern, show, tv Comments(1) November 25, 2009