Isiah Whitlock Jr., an actor who made frequent memorable appearances on the HBO series The Wire and Veep and in five films with director Spike Lee, died Tuesday. He was 71.
Whitlock’s manager Brian Liebman told The Associated Press in an email that the actor died in New York after a short illness.
Whitlock played openly corrupt state Sen. Clay Davis on 25 episodes across the five seasons of The Wire.
Davis, a fan-favourite character, was known for his profane catchphrase — “sheee-it” — delivered by Whitlock in moments of triumph and blunt honesty. The actor first used the phrase in his first film with Lee, 2002’s The 25th Hour, when his detective character discovers a cache of drugs hidden in a couch.
“It’s a big, big, big loss,” Lee said in a phone call with the AP on Tuesday night. “I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life.”
Whitlock went on to appear in four other Lee films, including 2004’s She Hate Me, 2012’s Red Hook Summer, 2015’s Chi-Raq, 2018’s BlacKkKlansman and 2020’s Da 5 Bloods.
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“We vibed over all those years,” Lee said. “We clicked from the jump.”
Lee said he has especially sweet memories of the extended time he spent with Whitlock shooting Da 5 Bloods on location in Thailand, and he fondly remembered the last time he saw Whitlock — Lee and his daughter, Satchel, sat with him at a screening of Kiss of the Spider Woman earlier this year.
“He was just a beautiful, beautiful soul,” Lee said. “If you were around him, he made everybody feel good in his presence. He would radiate. I would put that over his acting.”
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Lee pointed to Whitlock’s comic talents both on screen and off.
“He was hilarious,” Lee said. “That was just his nature, he made people laugh. Everybody was in on the joke.”
Whitlock is the second significant star of The Wire to die in recent weeks after the death of actor James Ransone.
A native of South Bend, Indiana, Whitlock went to Southwest Minnesota State University, where he played football and studied theater. Injuries pushed him to study acting, and he moved to San Francisco to work in theater.
He began appearing in small television guest roles on shows including Cagney and Lacy in the late 1980s, and he had very small roles in the 1990 films Goodfellas and Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
After The Wire, Whitlock moved on to another HBO show, the political satire Veep, where he played Secretary of Defense George Maddox for three seasons. The character ran against Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer in presidential primaries.
The Wire creator David Simon also paid tribute to Whitlock in a post on Bluesky.
“As fine an actor as he was,” Simon said, “Isiah was an even better spirit and the greatest gentleman.”
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