– Alan Siegel Omar Little, The WireĪ significant number of TV viewers will tell you that Michael K. The actor may have become famous for playing a legendarily intense stick-up man, but he was damn funny, too. Williams steals his short scenes, deadpanning his way to several laughs. “Yo, I think you’re done for,” Ray Ray says to Jackie, predicting the wannabe gangster’s doom both in the game and in the series. X.” Later, he relishes watching his young daughter kick the clueless Jackie’s ass in a chess match. In just a few minutes of screentime, Ray Ray squeezes in a handful of great lines, first welcoming Jackie to “the Boonton Holiday Inn” and then dubbing the anonymity-seeking, mobbed-up failson “Mr. But Williams, then still a relative unknown, managed to make him memorable. in his apartment in a public housing complex during the third-season finale “Army of One,” isn’t exactly an essential Sopranos character. Boardwalk Empire wasn’t a great show, but it made room for some great performances - including Williams, in a role less iconic than Omar but no less finely wrought. His final seasons on the show pitted him against Valentin Narcisse, an elegant rhetorician to Chalky’s plainspoken criminal. Chalky represents how that struggle looks to someone born knowing American law isn’t on his side. Boardwalk Empire is partly a show about marginalized groups, many of them immigrants, taking assimilation into their own hands. That scar looks, and that low rasp sounds, as natural in the New Jersey of a century ago as it does in contemporary Baltimore. One side effect of Williams’s particular gravitas is a sense of timelessness. Among stellar performances from Steve Buscemi, Michaels Shannon and Stuhlbarg, and Shea Whigham, Williams stands above as Chalky White, a bootlegger essential to the Atlantic City underworld of the Prohibition-era 1920s. Williams will partly be remembered as the king of the HBO That Guys, and no show featured as many HBO That Guys as Boardwalk Empire, the somewhat underrated period crime drama from various alumni of The Sopranos. To read our obituary and remembrance of his life, click here. To honor his legacy, our staff looks back at several of Williams’s most iconic roles that helped define his five-time Emmy-nominated career. Williams, the enormously gifted actor who starred in landmark drama series and films for more than two decades, was found dead on Monday at the age of 54.
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