Actor Goes From Stage to 'Wire' and Back
By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 16, 2008
You might know Delaney Williams as Sgt. Jay Landsman on HBO's "The Wire," but he grew up in Takoma Park as Bill Delaney. He's a local guy who, as an actor, calls himself "a character guy."
"I've played lead characters," says Williams, who has a whopper at the moment in Eddie Carbone, the complex Red Hook longshoreman who's tragically overprotective of his niece, in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge." "But I'm a character guy. And this role is kind of suited for a character guy, which is nice to see."
"A View From the Bridge" begins previews Friday at Arena Stage, where Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is already on the boards. That repertory is the center of a Miller-heavy month that includes "The Price" (starring Robert Prosky) at Theater J. Both troupes have also scheduled Miller "extras" -- such as play readings, discussion series and movie screenings.
At Arena, the hyperactivity extends to the actors, who double in the rotating repertory of "View" and "Salesman." Only two actors don't appear in both shows: David Agranov, playing the young Italian immigrant Rodolpho in "View"; and Williams, who had scheduling conflicts. Naturally, he feels like he's missing out on part of the fun, even though he has one of the most intriguing and explosive roles in the Miller canon.
"Next time, I don't care what it is -- I'm doing both," Williams says.
It's been tough to fit theater into his schedule the past few years, thanks to steady (and better-paying) supporting work in TV and movies. That includes his five-year stint with "The Wire" that concluded with the series finale last Sunday, and Sgt. Landsman is fairly typical of the roles the heavyset Williams, 45, gets on big and small screens. They tend to be blue-collar, often identified by job, not name: Detective, Fireman, Teamster.
"Most of the work I've done, and that most people do, there's not a whole lot of the craft of acting involved," Williams says of his screen work. (He changed his name when he joined the Screen Actors Guild -- "Bill Delaney" was already taken -- but informally he still goes by "Bill.") "You look exactly the way they want you to look, you sound like they want, and you say the lines. Your character's not in depth, unless you are the lead, or it's a long-running thing."
"The Wire," of course, was both long-running and a cut above, in no small part because the Baltimore-based crime drama kept everything more street-credible than even the post-"Sopranos" progressive cable TV standard.
"You can look at it and see it's not a Hollywood version of what they were trying to say and what they were trying to show," Williams says. "I think, fortunately for me, that's the case, as well. I'm not a television-looking guy."
Williams learned his trade on the not-so-mean streets of the D.C. theater scene, holding down a bank manager job for nearly a decade while acting around town in the 1980s and '90s. He played Chief O'Hara in a "Batman" spoof for Source Theatre (once arriving 15 minutes late for the midnight curtain and finding artistic director Bart Whiteman jumping into Williams's costume), and performed in a hollowed-out 14th Street ruin for Studio Theatre Secondstage's site-specific production of the down-and-out Irish drama "Road."
"Half the time we couldn't do it because of the weather," he says. "The other half of the time, it was just a lot of fun."
Williams briefly managed the Actors' Theatre of Washington, and acted with the nascent Washington Shakespeare Company and with Woolly Mammoth back when the company was in its tiny digs on Church Street. Five of the 15 actors in Arena's Miller rep -- Williams, Rick Foucheux, Naomi Jacobson, Nancy Robinette and J. Fred Shiffman -- can claim credits with old Woolly; another, Tim Getman, was in Woolly's "The Unmentionables" last fall.
"Tara Giordano mentioned that she's going to be doing a show at Woolly this fall," Williams says, laughing, of another "View" colleague. "So that probably completes it."
When "View" director Daniel Aukin held auditions, he didn't know Williams's track record around town -- on "The Wire" or at Arena, where the actor has nearly become a once-a-year fixture. (He has a running joke about hoping the company will someday schedule "a season of sheriffs.") New York-based Aukin says Williams was actually called for another part, but didn't seem right. Instead, he asked Williams to read for Eddie. Aukin expected to see the actor back in a few days.
"Ten minutes later, they said he was ready to come in," says Aukin, who was duly impressed. "I didn't think an actor could get a bead on the material so quickly. So I auditioned him several times, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing."
Colorful auditions seem to be Williams's thing. He recalls going in for "The Wire" -- the creators remembered him fondly as "Scale Guy" from their HBO miniseries "The Corner" in 2000 -- and nearly blowing it.
"I read the first couple of lines and then was all in my head about, oh no, this is not going well," Williams says. "So when I got to the end of my read, I said, 'Stop -- listen, can I do this again, and this time in English? Because I have no idea what I just said.' And I think it was actually that part of the audition that kind of cemented it."
The career has been a balancing act -- first holding down the bank job so he could work around town, and now taking Amtrak back and forth to New York. That keeps the film and TV gigs coming so he can afford the more satisfying theater work while taking care of his two sons, aged 8 and 6. He teaches classes at Washington's Theatre Lab on acting for the camera, sharing insights that he learned the hard way. Doing the pilot of "The Wire," he says, "I hadn't been on a film or video shoot in probably a year, or year and a half." Theater habits kicked in: "I came on set, and I was yellin'."
Other secrets: Be prepared to repeat single scenes dozens of times. Hazards on "The Wire" included getting stuck eating a cheesesteak in take after take, and smoking in one scene until the retakes made him sick. (The cigarettes were his idea, and lesson learned.) Not that he misses the old bank job.
"I can't live without what I do now," Williams says pensively. Then he smiles: "And I feel like I'm actually getting okay at it, you know?"
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