The Wire star James Ransone died by suicide on Friday, according to records from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. The 46-year-old was survived by his wife, Jamie McPhee, and his two young kids.
The actor starred in 12 episodes of The Wire’s second season in 2003, marking a turn in one of TV’s most influential and acclaimed shows. The series also starred Dominic West, Idris Elba and Michael Kenneth Williams, and followed the drug trade in Baltimore, Maryland.
James, who was born and raised in Baltimore himself, portrayed Ziggy Sobotka, a dock worker and the son of a union leader. He scored his first onscreen role in 2001’s The American Astronaut, after discovering a love of acting and graduating from New York’s The School of the Visual Arts.
“I did not fit in well with all of the kids. Adolescence was a really hard time for me – as I think it is for most kids,” he told Interview magazine in 2016.
“It’s so uncomfortable. With normal public schools, I used to have a really hard time with them. Then my mom found this school. She was like, ‘Hey, they’re opening this arts school. You can go. You have to audition.'”
“I think it saved me as a kid. Going to arts school saved me,” he added.
© Corbis via Getty ImagesJames appeared in several notable projects in the years following, including Prom Night, Sinister, Sinister 2, Tangerine, Mr Right, It: Chapter Two, The Black Phone and Black Phone 2.
His final screen credit was a role in the Peacock series Poker Face in June alongside Natasha Lyonne. James has been open about his battle with substance abuse after being sexually assaulted as a child, and shared that he got sober in the late ’00s.
© Getty Images“People think I got sober working on the [TV show] Generation Kill. I didn’t,” he told Interview magazine. “I sobered up six or seven months before that. I remember going to Africa and I was going to be there for almost a year. I was number two on the call sheet, and I was like, ‘I think somebody made a mistake. This is too much responsibility for me.'”
He added that being on the 2008 show was a highlight in his life. “Living in Africa, being around the dudes who were being written about – since my dad is a Vietnam vet. Being around these marines who had fought in war, and they were young, I got to see some version of my dad as a young man. A lot of things started to make sense to me in a different way.”
© Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK via Getty ImJames later scored a leading role in 2019’s It: Chapter Two as the grown-up version of Eddie Kaspbrak. He shared with IndieWire that the opportunity came about right when he had given up on Hollywood.
“I really thought I was going to leave and not do this anymore in 2017, for real,” the father of two shared. “I was not very happy about certain things that were happening in the business. I was really considering going back to school for theology.”
© CBS via Getty Images“I was like, ‘Oh, no one really cares, and money’s sort of more important than anything else.’ I know that we’re in a business, too, and we’re so fortunate that we get to make art that also gets to make money, but I just felt a little jaded.”
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