His death this past Monday, at the age of fifty-four, of a possible overdose, has cut tragically short one of the most interesting careers in television history. There was the thinker, in Williams, and the romantic. Was it Williams’s early exposure to drag and other expressions of freedom that helped him connect with his characters-commune with them, almost spiritually? When, in “Lovecraft Country,” his Montrose Freeman, anguished by his sexuality, closes his eyes, submits to the music, and allows the queens to lift him off the dance floor-what was that scene but a kind of conversion? There was a relinquishment of self, in his too-small œuvre, a theory of acting as being. He joined tours for Madonna and George Michael as a background dancer, in addition to doing choreography work for certified divas. “I would literally just pound that pavement up and down Broadway, running up in record companies, finding out who the new artist-you need new dancers, man?” he told NPR. He left school to pursue dance and spent a year intermittently homeless, sleeping on trains and in clubs, as he tried to land gigs. Before he was an actor, Williams was a dancer, first brought to his feet, he once said, by Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video. At the time, he was a complete unknown-unless you were a club kid or a house head, in which case you might have recognized him as Mike, the beautiful Brooklyn baby with the hooked smile and wrinkled brow, who was something of a fixture on the ballroom scene. This was in 1996, when Williams was twenty-nine, years before Omar Little was in him. He lives silently in the shadow of the composition, exuding a menace that is understated until it becomes a tangible presence, and when he gives economical voice to that menace-“Get outta here,” he snarls, as he shoves the goons out of the vehicle-the power dynamic of the American gangster genre is flipped, and it is the white man who finds his neck yoked. Williams plays High Top, Tank’s brother and unthinking sentinel, and he’s hardly allowed into the frame-until he is. In one scene, Tank grills two white boys about the emergence of a neighborhood threat. ![]() Tupac Shakur fills the screen as Tank, the glamorous drug dealer who settles scores from the comforts of a limousine. Williams’s death, do I find myself dwelling on his performance in Julien Temple’s forgotten flick “Bullet”? It should have been a nothing role.
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