All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): It never got any easier for me. It was a real problem for me, actually. I worked pretty hard on it. I think the producers felt that, eventually, perhaps I wouldn’t need the coach anymore, but I did. I needed it right up until we wrapped the whole series, and it was a constant effort particularly anytime he got emotional or you started shouting. That’s when you lose the accent and start going into your own accent. I always dreaded those scenes, and it was a pain in the ass.

  It would have been so much easier to have done it in my own accent, but I suppose that wouldn’t have necessarily sounded right. I do remember meeting Idris for the first time, and he’s got a London accent, and I was saying to him, “Fuck, what about this accent?” Actually, I didn’t realize he was English initially, because he was talking the whole time in American and he was living in New York at the time. I was chatting to him, and eventually he said, “Look, you’ve got to stop talking in that English accent because you’re fucking me up.” He was trying to do American the whole time, as a proper actor should, so we had to keep clear of each other for the first few weeks because we’d fuck each other up.

  IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): We would laugh about it. There was only one scene where we actually worked together, and as soon as he walks in, he was talking in his English accent, and I started talking in my English accent, and I said, “Mate, we’re never going to be able to pull this off.” He was laughing about it. I never really said to him, “Don’t do it.” It was more of a joke. It was really hard working with an English actor and you’re both playing Americans. It feels a bit fake.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): They were battling over who would lose their accent first. Idris won that bet. Dom would go in and out all over the place. Maybe he’s Irish. Maybe he’s from Baltimore. Keep him drinking. Get some Jameson in him and cover up his accent.

  Early on, HBO executives asked David Simon to cut a seemingly pointless scene featuring a shadowy figure named Omar, who robbed drug dealers. His presence did not seem relevant to them in moving the story along. Simon asked them to wait. The introduction of Omar, he said, would serve as a placeholder for the character when he was reestablished later in the inaugural season.

  The request paid off. Television had never seen a character as full of multitudes as Omar Little, depicted brilliantly by Michael K. Williams. The role was the first major gig for Williams, a native of Brooklyn’s East Flatbush, who had dropped out of school to pursue a dancing career. Omar wore a duster and a bulletproof vest, carried a .44 Magnum, and whistled “The Farmer in the Dell” as he stalked the streets, ringing fear in the neighborhood. Yet, he nurtured out-of-luck mothers, refrained from cursing, attended church with his grandmother, and showed a caring, tender touch with his gay lovers. As inconceivable as it sounds, Omar, too, was sourced from real-life inspirations. During his days on the force, Ed Burns found that stick-up artists roamed independently and often maintained their own set of rules, while providing accurate information. He cultivated several into his best sources. Donnie Andrews, one of the primary inspirations for Omar, positively transformed his later life, becoming a consultant on The Wire.

  “The guys that I knew, the Anthony Hollies, Shorty Boyd, those type of guys, they all had a code,” Burns said. “They all lived by something, and they hunted drug dealers. That’s what they hunted. Donnie [Andrews], he was ferocious. Ferdinand [Harvin], this guy was amazing. He gave me a call one time, and says, ‘You want to hit this house.’ We got a search warrant, hit the house. It’s three guys who are in their fifties. You don’t see many guys in their fifties with shoulder holsters, with .45s in the shoulder holsters, at a table. It was a substantial amount of drugs on the table, but we didn’t find all Ferdinand said was in there.

  “I went outside, and I called him up. I said, ‘We can’t find it.’ He says, ‘I don’t understand you. Every time I been at their house, I find everything.’ I said, ‘Ferdinand, I can’t put a gun down a guy’s mouth. I mean, I’m willing to talk to the guy, but I can’t do that.’ ”

  ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): Michael K. had auditioned for me for Oz. You keep very good records for all your auditions. I had to figure out which character it was that he had auditioned for, and I had to go back every season and go through every page until I could find him. I knew I had wrote in my notes that he had this scar, so that’s how I refound him to have him in for The Wire. He made an impression. I knew I wanted to see him again.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I mean, it was odd. How many people walk around with a scar in the middle of their face? It’s a very odd thing to see. When you really think about it, on my face, you know? My face got mauled over. It’s jarring.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We picked Omar, primarily, because of the scar. His first scene was him and his partner, getting ready to go do a robbery, and the guy comes and gives him a sawed-off shotgun. He takes the shotgun and—Mike was the name of the guy who gave it to him—he starts walking away, and Michael K. says, “Excuse me.” “Yes?” “How do you open this?” “It’s a fucking shotgun, Michael.” I’m standing right next to him going, “Oh God, this is going to be so bad,” And then he goes out there and it looked like when he was in his crib, his mother gave him a shotgun.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): My contract was for seven episodes. It was guaranteed seven, and then after that, we’ll see. The direction and the development of the character happened as the character in the show went along. It served the storyline and the authenticity of the story that David was telling to take Omar out at any given time. It was clear to me that that would be the case. No one knew when Omar was going to go. No one knew. He didn’t have a trajectory for Omar. I was told that Omar would meet his demise at one point or another. I remember me being told that early on. When, how—that was up in the air. I went into every season like, Now this could be it. His trajectory wasn’t as thought out, in my belief, as maybe a Barksdale storyline or the Stringer Bell storyline.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): He was only supposed to be in seven [episodes] of the first season. He misapprehended the idea of “And then you’re dead.” We basically only contracted for seven, and we didn’t have a pickup for another season, so I knew we weren’t going to bring him back every episode, and I think he only comes on in [Episode] Three. I don’t think he’s lying, but I’ve since seen his interviews and I’ve joked with him about it.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I was a deer in the headlights, full-on in Season One.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Omar is a composite of five or six guys that were my informants who were gun slingers. Each one brought a little something to the Omar character, and it became the present character.

  This guy, Anthony Hollie, he was extremely soft-spoken, very gentle, and a ferocious gunslinger. I mean, ferocious. He had a buddy that he always hung around with, who was a younger guy. That might have been in the back of my head. His buddy was beaten to death by the drug dealers, and Anthony retaliated. That scene of the body slung across the car—that’s probably how David and I came up with that, just by going over his story. Anthony and Donnie [Andrews], when they were on your side, it was a one hundred percent. It was no games. They didn’t play games. They trusted you implicitly, and I trusted them implicitly. They were solid. A lot of the other guys you would never turn your back on, but that’s how that happened.

  Anthony never cursed, never raised his voice. He came out of his house one Sunday morning and there must have been six or seven guys waiting for him. If you go down the street, you can still see the pock marks, the bullet holes, where they shot, and that was a true violation, because he went to visit his mother. That was Sunday; he was supposed to have a break. Didn’t happen. They wanted him real bad, so I got him into witness protection and got him out of the city.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): [Avon and Stringer] are not Melvin [Williams] and Chin [Farmer]. They start from that s
tarting point, but then you’re grafting into all these different guys that you knew or heard stories about. There’s elements of [Maurice] “Peanut” King. There’s elements of Will Franklin. The characters become ten different guys, and then the actors become themselves. They become totally somebody else. There’s no one-to-one ratio for anybody.

  Omar’s six different guys.

  MICHAEL KEVIN DARNALL (BRANDON WRIGHT): I worked my first day on The Wire. It was awesome. I met Michael K. Williams and Lance Williams, who played Omar and [John] Bailey. We got along really well. I met Dominic, Sonja, and Andre, and it was really great. It was awesome, but it was really hard. Because, after that first day of work, I went home to my day job, because we had wraps so early in the day. I was telling my coworkers about this great day on set. They were asking me a million questions, and then something said, Check your voicemail. I was having this aching suspicion. I called my voicemail, and one of my close friends, actress Amanda Fields, she had left me a message. I called, and she told me that my girlfriend had passed away. So, it was like, “Holy shit.” The best day of my life was suddenly the worst day of my life.

  I, of course, was frantic, and my boss said, “Go home. Take care of yourself.” I did, and the next day, I was up at five in the morning to go back to The Wire. So, that next day was not as great. I was really kind of in a daze. We filmed well into the night. We did the scene where we robbed the stash house, where Omar takes the shotgun and blows the guy’s legs away. I just remember Peter Medak, the director—he was so frustrated with me. Uta, the cinematographer, she was like, “Michael, you got to slow down.” I was moving so fast, and I didn’t tell anyone but my cast members and the makeup people, Debi [Young]. So, they didn’t really know what was going on with me, but, yeah, I was completely out of it that day.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I think it was about two or three days on set that I had been working before I even met David. He ran up on me one night when I was wrapping, going to get my ride to go back to base camp to change, and he ran up on me and he introduced himself and he said, “Man,” his exact words, “if I’d known you guys, the three of you”—and it was Omar, Michael, the guy who played his love interest, and Lance Williams, who played Bailey—and he goes, “Man, you guys know how to make it work.” He goes, “Man, I wish I would have known in the beginning that you were going to bring it to where you were, because I would have made you kind of like my Wild Bunch.” I was like, “What do you mean Wild Bunch?” He looked at me and said, “You never watched the Western The Wild Bunch?” I was like, “No.” That was probably the first and only homework that David gave me. He told me I was to go watch The Wild Bunch and another Western because he wrote Omar’s duster, the Wild, Wild West, and the standoff with Brother Mouzone and Omar in the alleyway—those are an old-school Western thing.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): There were some of these guys who robbed drug dealers I knew all about. Some of them I didn’t. Obviously, Donnie [Andrews] I knew. There was a duo that always worked together. Ed told me many stories about Cadillac and his partner. He told me the story, and somehow, in one of the stories he told, I assumed that they were gay, that they were lovers. They were inseparable. They worked together robbing drug dealers for years and years and years. They lived together. I thought they were gay. So, I looked around our universe and said, “Can anybody in this world be gay? Somebody ought to be.” I knew lots of openly lesbian cops. I didn’t know any openly gay male police. But I knew plenty of lesbian cops, proud ones, so Kima was an obvious choice. And then I looked around in the structured drug trade and—I could be wrong; I’m sure there are exceptions, but it seemed to me a very homophobic culture. But a guy on his own robbing drug dealers? That feels right. And hey, we have the example of Cadillac.

  It was, like, a year later when somebody was asking me a question in an interview and I started to bring up that there was a duo in Baltimore, and Ed looked at me and said, “They weren’t gay.” In my mind, I’d used them as ballast to justify it, but I just got it wrong.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): They kept writing. I knew that the dude was gay. All they kept doing: Omar rubs the boy’s lips. Omar rubs the boy’s hair. Omar holds the boy’s hand. I’m like, “Don’t gay people fuck? You know what I mean? Don’t they kiss? Don’t they grab each other?” I was like, “Listen, we’ve got to step it up.” [Michael Kevin Darnall] was with it, and I’ll never forget, he made me laugh. He said, “When do you think it should happen?” I went to tell him. I wanted to tell him right after I cut that barrel, that double-barrel shotgun and say, “Let’s go hunting.” But he was like, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me, because if I know when it’s coming, I might freeze up. Just go for it.”

  [Director Clark Johnson] looked at me. He gagged. That dude, he was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Stop the work. Run that back.”

  MICHAEL KEVIN DARNALL (BRANDON WRIGHT): Michael and I were sitting in that van once, waiting to shoot another couple of lines of dialogue. He was just sort of sitting there quietly, looking out in the distance. He said, “You know, Michael, when this thing finally airs, we’re going to get a lot of phone calls.” He, more so than I ever could imagine, knew how big this Omar character was going to be. He was just prescient in that way. Just in the bottom of his heart, pit of his stomach, he just really had a feeling that this was going to be big. And it was. Look at what Omar became, and look what it did for Michael’s career. Pretty amazing stuff. I really think that we were, perhaps, the first two men of color to have a kiss on national television.

  [After Brandon is killed], to see the amount of vitriol and ignorance coming from the viewing audience, by making the mistake back then of reading comments on message boards and YouTube. As an artist, I was not afraid. I guess that’s my ignorance as a young, eager artist. Then reality hit. It was like, There’s a lot of ugliness in this world, and I don’t think you were really ready for it. That’s not to say that that’s the overwhelming response. Because the overwhelming response, of course, has been absolutely positive to this show, and to Omar and his relationships. Yeah, I think that was the big surprise for me. That there is a world of hate out there.

  There were things like, “I’m glad that faggot is dead.” People who will be like, “Omar’s a real man or Omar’s my nigga, but that little faggot bitch…His little, red, dick-riding bitch.” Things like that, that kind of make you laugh, but then you’re like, “Oh, that’s pretty terrible.” I think what hurt the most was the idea that a quote-unquote hypermasculine gay person was okay, but a fair-skinned, soft-spoken, light-haired gay guy who people couldn’t tell if I was black, white, mixed, Latino—they called me everything under the book. That somehow that kind of gay person didn’t deserve to live or that he was unworthy of any sort of admiration or love—that hurt. Even though, look at what Brandon did, he went to bat, and he didn’t give up Omar’s name. He sat and—of course, this is all off-screen—he sat and got tortured and got his life taken because he didn’t give up Omar’s name. That’s not as macho or impressive as toting around a sawed-off shotgun and whistling “The Farmer in the Dell.” People, not everyone, but some people forget about that aspect of Brandon, that he went out rather valiantly.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): It was the first time I ever got an extreme close-up; it was on The Wire. My knucklehead up in the full screen—it was on The Wire. It was the scene where Omar says, “Omar don’t scare.” That scene where he’s being interrogated in the police department about who killed his lover, played by Michael? The director was Ed Bianchi, right? Ed wanted me to play it like no emotion, like cold, all bravado. It’s like Omar the Terror.

  Uta was the DP [director of photography]. She stood up. She has such a strong feeling while she was looking up through the camera. It was so intense. She said, “I think that he should have a little bit of softness, like a little more emotion, to show that he has a little softer side. This man has lost his
lover viciously. There should be something else there. Not just all rage and terror.” They started to argue. It became a thing. I have never seen it before or since in my career, when the DP felt that strongly about something that they argued with the fucking director, but she did.

  If you know Ed, you know that Ed don’t take no shit. You ain’t going to work. No, Ed don’t take no shit. She had to bow down and play her position, but when it was all said and done, before them cameras rolled, she came up behind me and patted my shoulder. She said, “Find a way to give us both what we want.” No pressure. No fucking pressure at all. All I know is when you go back and look at that scene where Omar says, “Omar don’t scare,” and you look in his eyes, whatever you see there, that is me trying to give them both what they felt they needed to see. I’ll never forget that.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): I would never, ever go behind a director’s back and give opposite directions to what he or she has given the actor prior. That would be completely undermining the director. It’s not my position as a DP to do that. And I know in my heart I would have never done such a thing.

  Yes, I have strong opinions, but I also tried never to argue with directors, but respect their word as the final direction, especially speaking performances. It’s absolutely not my place to make my opinion heard in any way.

  It happened to me often, though, that sometimes actors would come up to me with a question regarding their performance. My answer to them always was, “Sorry, but I can’t speak to this. You have to ask the director.” And this is the absolute truth about how I carried myself as a DP on set.