Conversations with Michael K. Williams (2017)

Career Q&A with Michael K. Williams.  Moderated by Jim Halterman, TV Guide Magazine.

Michael Kenneth Williams is one of this generation’s most respected and acclaimed actors. By bringing complicated and charismatic characters to life - often with surprising tenderness - Williams has established himself as a gifted and versatile performer with a unique ability to mesmerize audiences.

Williams is best known for his remarkable work on The Wire, which ran for five seasons on HBO. The wit and humor that Williams brought to Omar - the whistle-happy, profanity-averse, drug dealer-robbing stickup man - earned him high praise and made Omar one of television’s most memorable characters.

Williams co-starred in HBO’s critically acclaimed series Boardwalk Empire. In the Martin Scorsese- and Terence Winter-produced show, Williams played Chalky White, a 1920s bootlegger and impeccably suited veritable mayor of Atlantic City’s African-American community. In 2012, Boardwalk Empire won a Screen Actors Guild Award® for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Giving back to the community plays an important role in Williams’s off-camera life. He is working to launch Making Kids Win, a charitable organization whose primary objective is to build community centers in urban neighborhoods that are in need of safe spaces for children to learn and play. Michael currently serves as the ACLU's ambassador of Smart Justice.

Williams also executive produces and serves as the investigative journalist for Black Market, a documentary program that exposes and comments on illegal markets throughout the world with a focus on the people involved and connecting with them on a human level. Black Market is a flagship show for Vice’s newly launched network VICELAND.