BALTIMORE — During the five seasons that “The Wire” was broadcast on HBO, co-creators David Simon and Ed Burns filled it with more complicated and nuanced characters than a Russian novel.
The show introduced an international television audience to dozens of actors at a relatively early stage of their careers. Some had never acted before they showed up on the Baltimore set.
“This was the hardest show I’ve ever done,” said Pat Moran, who handled casting duties for the show with the New York-based casting director Alexa L. Fogel.
“I needed kids and people that were from the demographic that the show was about,” Moran said. " I didn’t need kids with braces on their teeth that sell Jell-O. I needed the real deal.”
In the 20 years since the show debuted, most of the actors portraying main characters are still working steadily. Several have gone on to stellar careers. A few, tragically, have died.
Below is a round-up of what some of the key figures are doing now based on interviews and online biographies.
Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty)
If “The Wire” had a star, it would be West, who portrayed McNulty, a character loosely based on Burns, a retired Baltimore City Police homicide detective.
At the time West was cast he had more experience than many of the other actors, playing supporting roles in two all-star films: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1999, and the Academy Award-winning “Chicago” in 2002.
But it wasn’t until West portrayed the maverick McNulty in “The Wire” that his career really took off. From 2014 to 2019, he stared as novelist Noah Solloway on Showtime’s hit television series, “The Affair.” More recently, he signed on to portray Prince Charles in the final two seasons of Netflix’ “The Crown.”
Fun fact: Despite his authentic Bawlamer accent, West is Irish.
Idris Elba (Russell “Stringer” Bell)
Elba had been appearing in supporting roles for not quite a decade when he was cast in “The Wire” as the brilliant second-in-command of the Barksdale drug dealing organization. Following “The Wire,” Elba racked up a slew of starring roles, award nominations and a Golden Globe for portraying the title character for five seasons in the British psychological crime thriller, “Luther.”
“The Wire” character’s cool charisma combined with his intelligence made Stringer Bell a fan favorite. In 2018, People magazine named Elba “the sexiest man alive.”
“Nobody beats that guy," Moran said. On the set one day, I happened to pass a group of actors and I heard this thick, thick British accent. It was Idris, for God’s sake.”
Sonja Sohn (Shakima “Kima” Greggs)
Of all the out-of-town actors who descended on Baltimore during the series, it may be Sohn who most deeply embraced Charm City.
Sohn, who played the dedicated and compassionate detective Shakima “Kima” Greggs, moved to Baltimore in 2003. She lived here for nearly a decade, bought her first home here, and her daughter attended Baltimore School for the Arts.
In 2009, Sohn founded a nonprofit organization that worked with formerly incarcerated youths for six years. The actress invested $200,000 of her own money in “ReWired for Change,” she wrote in a 2015 New York Times opinion column.
Baltimore, Sohn wrote, ”is where I discovered that I had the soul of an activist.”
Recently, Sohn has been exploring the other side of the camera. She made her directorial debut in 2017 with the documentary “Baltimore Rising.” A second documentary, “The Slow Hustle,” examined the mysterious circumstances surrounding Baltimore Police Department detective Sean Suiter’s death in 2017 and was broadcast on HBO last year.
Michael K. Williams (Omar Little)
The character of Jimmy McNulty might have been the star of “The Wire,” but Omar Little, the stick-up man with a strict moral code, was arguably the show’s single most unforgettable character.
Williams had a career before “The Wire.” Among other things, he danced in a Madonna music video. And he had a career after the show, appearing as the 1920s bootlegger Chalky White in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”
But Omar was Williams’ masterpiece, winning praise from such high-profile fans as former President Barack Obama.
“Michael, you rose up from the ashes,” Moran said. “You had it all.”
The actor had talked openly about how an ongoing drug addiction worsened during the series and how he began to confuse his character’s identity with his own. He died Sept. 6 in New York after overdosing on a combination of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine.
Andre Royo (Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins)
Royo will never forget the day in 2012 he was filming a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen in Washington, D.C., when he was spotted by Obama.
“He stopped when he saw me and said, “Hold up, is that my man Bubs,” Royo told HBO in an online interview.
But Royo’s proudest moment on “The Wire” might have been when a stranger approached the actor on the set. Royo was in character as the gentle drug addict Bubbles when the onlooker pressed a small package of heroin into his hands, telling him: “Man, you need this more than I do.”
Royo described that moment as his “street Oscar” In a 2007 interview with New Yorker magazine.
Since the show, Royo has played attorney Thurston “Thirsty” Rawlings for several seasons of the Fox television show, “Empire.” His portrayal in Josh Locy’s 2016 film, “Hunter Gatherer,” won raves and a special jury prize for best actor at the 2016 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Royo said that working on “The Wire” changed his attitude towards street people.
“Before playing Bubbles, I’d walk right by a homeless person,” he told HBO. “You become desensitized — ‘You’re homeless? That’s your problem buddy.’
“After the show, it was like, people matter.”
Robert Chew (”Proposition Joe” Stewart)
Proposition Joe was one of the great comic characters of “The Wire, and watching him sweat his way out of a sticky situation made for some of the series’ most enjoyable moments. The writers gave the character an intentionally ornate speaking style that matched the convoluted twists and turns of Joe’s mind, and Chew’s delivery was pitch-perfect.
One example during a conversation with Omar: “A businessman such as myself does not believe in bad blood with a man such as yourself. It disturbs the sleep.”
But Chew once told The Sun that he loved teaching kids as much — if not more — than he loved performing. Through his work with Baltimore’s Arena Players, Chew brought talented young actors to the attention of local casting directors. He also coached the young actors on “The Wire’s” set.
Chew died of a heart attack in 2013 at age 52.
Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield)
Jamie Hector said that his parents didn’t figure out that he had an acting career until they attended the third season premiere of “The Wire.” Fearing their disapproval, he hid his ambitions from them.
But by 2004, the cat was out of the bag. Hector’s 2003 performance in “Five Deep Breaths”, a short independent film that won a bunch of prestigious awards, lead to him being cast as the cool-as-ice drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield in “The Wire,” the role that jump-started the actor’s career.
Since “The Wire,” Hector spent seven years playing Detective Jerry Edgar on “Bosch,” Amazon’s longest-running series, and recently he performed the key role of Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter in the HBO miniseries, “We Own This City.”
In his spare time, Hector has founded a New York-based free arts program for at-risk kids. He has established his own production company to tell stories about everyday people who do extraordinary things.
And, he’s begun writing children’s books.
“I grew to love Baltimore during my three years there,” Hector told The Sun. “I’m grateful to the people who allowed us to tell the stories we told.”
Felicia Pearson (Snoop)
The woman whom the novelist Stephen King once called “perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series” had never acted in any production until 2004, when she visited the set of “The Wire” after meeting Michael K. Williams in a bar.
“She’s a wonderful person and she’s hilarious,” Hector said. “When she was on the set, she would cut up and have us all in stitches.”
Since “The Wire” left the air, Pearson has made two films with Spike Lee. Recently, she teamed up with Burns to develop a miniseries about her life. In her 2007 memoir, the actress revealed she had been born to two incarcerated, drug-addicted parents, was raised in the foster care system, and served six years in prison after being convicted of reckless homicide.
“Felicia has a phenomenal story to tell,” Burns said.
“Our show looks at the world through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl who was gay and looks at how she made her way. The stories she tells in her memoir only scratch the surface.”
Michael B. Jordan (Wallace)
Perhaps more than any other actor from “The Wire”, Jordan’s post-show career has soared to stratospheric heights. Jordan was just 15-years-old when he was cast as Wallace, a drug dealer who is murdered after he becomes a police informant.
Since “The Wire” Jordan has starred in three films directed by Ryan Coogler: “Fruitvale Station”; “Creed” and most memorably as super-villain Erik Killmonger in “Black Panther.”
Jordan has achieved bona fide celebrity status, with pop culture magazines reporting on every development of his romance with model Lori Harvey, the daughter of comedian Steve Harvey. (Yes, they recently split but it will be even more romantic when they get back together.)
“He was just a kid when he was on the set for the first season of ‘The Wire,’ Moran said. “And now he’s an A-list actor.”
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