Actor Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who played Senator Davis in The Wire, died “after a short illness” on Dec. 30. He was 71. Whitlock made his debut in 1981 and was continually busy thereafter. He appeared in the Spike Lee films She’s Gotta Have It, Red Hook Summer, She Hate Me, Chi-Rag, and Da 5 Bloods, as well as the films Goodfellas, Pieces of April, 1408, Enchanted, Cedar Rapids, Pete’s Dragon, Cars 3, and The Old Man & the Gun, and on TV in The Good Cop, Veep, Chappelle's Show, Your Honor, and Law & Order (in several of his roles, Whitlock unleashed his trademark “sheeeee-it!”). Whitlock told interviewer Joel Murphy that acting was “one of those things I’ve always wanted to do. There were some other things I had thought about maybe doing, like journalism and teaching and things like that, but once I got started in drama, I realized it was something that I really loved to do . . . It’s never easy and it’s all relative and you never, ever get what you want. No matter who you are, you always want something better. But when I compare it to everything else, I think I do okay.”
