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" You may know Michael K. Williams by his infamous whistle as he walked the streets of Baltimore in HBO&amp;#039;s The Wire. But the man who played Omar Little, and who now rules Atlantic City as Chalky White on Boardwalk Empire, also recently lent his impressive talents to Battlefield 4, a new video game available now on all platforms (including the just-launched PlayStation 4). In the game Williams plays Kimble &amp;quot;Irish&amp;quot; Graves, a staff sergeant who guides you and a band of special ops soldiers through international combat zones in the year 2020. We recently talked to Williams about his most famous roles, and about how difficult it is to imagine an almost empty room as the front lines of a raging battlefield. ESQUIRE.COM: I actually just started going through The Wire again a few weeks ago, my third time, and it&amp;#039;s still incredible. MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS: Thanks, man. Playing Omar and taking part in the show was just a total blessing for me. ESQ: Were you ever surprised by how universally loved and respected your character was? MKW: You could say surprised or shocked, but it&amp;#039;s more of a humbling experience for me. I knew around season three that we were on to something a lot bigger than just my career or a television show. It was much larger and more meaningful. ESQ: What did it feel like before season three? MKW: Smaller. I just didn&amp;#039;t know the show would reach the level of respect that it did, but the only thing that was small, really, was my view toward it. I was a really young actor and I didn&amp;#039;t know what it was like to play a recurring role on a show. Like any young actor, I just was thinking all about me and my career. And as I grew and got to know these characters and this world and I started to see people&amp;#039;s responses to it, I realized it actually had nothing to do with me. It was a lot bigger than that, and it put things in perspective for me. ESQ: Do people still shout &amp;quot;Omar&amp;#039;s coming!&amp;quot; when you walk down the street? MKW: Absolutely. And that&amp;#039;s a blessing, too. They could be running up to me saying a lot worse things than something like &amp;quot;Hey Omar!&amp;quot; People ask me if I ever get tired of it, but the answer&amp;#039;s always going to be no. I&amp;#039;ll never get tired of it and I&amp;#039;ll always be grateful that I left something on this earth that people will always react to in such a way. ESQ: Were you ever concerned that Chalky was just going to be seen or end up as a Prohibition Era Omar? MKW: Not at all. I was actually determined to make sure that wouldn&amp;#039;t happen, but the two guys obviously have their similarities. They both have a moral code that they live by. They both stand up for themselves. They both speak their minds. They both made the most of limited opportunities offered to them in their respective worlds. But my first goal was to make sure that people didn&amp;#039;t see Chalky as Omar in a 1920s suit. ESQ: The suits are a nice touch, though. MKW: Yeah, and the clothes definitely help to differentiate the characters. You walk differently in a pair of wingtips and an overcoat than you would in sneakers with a shotgun under your trench. It&amp;#039;s just a different era, man. ESQ: How much of the real Michael K. Williams bleeds into both characters? MKW: I played them with a certain amount of heart, a certain amount of sensibility and sensitivity. Those are the things I bring to these guys, you know? At first glance, most people would just deem them as stereotypical or, I guess, strong alpha-male kind of guys. But they&amp;#039;re human beings and they have various sides to them. I look for opportunities to show the humanity of these characters because they&amp;#039;re very real to me and because I&amp;#039;ve known people like them throughout my different walks of life. ESQ: How are you enjoying the ways Chalky is evolving season to season? MKW: It&amp;#039;s beautiful. They opened my storyline a lot and you get to see so much of black American culture through this season. They&amp;#039;re touching on the Harlem Renaissance, so it&amp;#039;s music, it&amp;#039;s fashion, it&amp;#039;s art, it&amp;#039;s dance, it&amp;#039;s language. It&amp;#039;s everything. But we also see the demise of the American black culture through things like heroin and what that did to us as a community. So it&amp;#039;s not just about my character, but about the black experience in the 1920s in America. ESQ: How important was that aspect when you originally signed up for the show? MKW: It was important. It&amp;#039;s important that I get the opportunity to make sure it&amp;#039;s done properly. I think all aspects of black culture are important to explore, whether it&amp;#039;s my role in 12 Years a Slave or Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, or whether it&amp;#039;s The Butler. Black culture is an important part of American history. ESQ: What was it like for you to take that passion beyond film and TV and into video games with Battlefield 4? MKW: It was a pleasure to be asked to join Battlefield 4. I&amp;#039;m not a gamer and I recognize it&amp;#039;s a different machine, but it was a great first-time experience for me. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s your role in the game? MKW: I play as Staff Sergeant &amp;quot;Irish,&amp;quot; who helps guide the player through these various missions and tasks to save civilians while we&amp;#039;re at war. And in the process of doing that, me and the other guys have to learn to get along. We&amp;#039;re a makeshift team that normally wouldn&amp;#039;t work together, but we have to figure out how to trust people we&amp;#039;d rather not trust, and learn that sometimes the bad guys aren&amp;#039;t as bad as we thought. So there&amp;#039;s a moral story underwriting what&amp;#039;s happening in the game. ESQ: Did you just lend your voice? MKW: Nah, it&amp;#039;s a full performance. I had to put on the catsuit with the sensor balls and everything. It was cool. It&amp;#039;s different because there&amp;#039;s really nothing to go on around us. With other acting jobs there&amp;#039;s the set, there&amp;#039;s wardrobe, there&amp;#039;s all the stuff that lends itself to the reality of the scene. With a video game you&amp;#039;re in a blank room with other people wearing catsuits and sensor balls, so you have to create this entire world in your mind. ESQ: How do you pull that off? MKW: You just gotta do it. You just have to use your imagination. You don&amp;#039;t have that massive battlefield laid out in front of you, but you still have to envision that you&amp;#039;re under heavy gunfire and shouting at your guys as you&amp;#039;re running into the battle. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s it like to see yourself in a video game for the first time? MKW: I actually haven&amp;#039;t seen it yet. ESQ: Really? If I was in a video game it&amp;#039;s probably all I would think about until I finally played it. MKW: [Laughs] It just hasn&amp;#039;t happened yet. Like I said, I&amp;#039;m not a gamer. But my sons are, so as soon as we get some time they&amp;#039;re going to bring the Playstation over and we&amp;#039;re going to go to task. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a26068/michael-k-williams-boardwalk-battlefield-1113/>