In Memoriam: Lance Reddick

When I read about Lance Reddick passing, my ears began to ring, and a numb sinking sensation spread from my shoulders to my feet. I don’t know how long I sat with that feeling in silence. Though I never met the man, I often felt that I had from the roles he portrayed. I was raised in Baltimore, where Reddick was born and where The Wire is set. So, weekly episode premieres were something of a communal religious experience. We locals knew the radio stations and lingo featured on the show, the street names and sneaker trends. Plus, the McCormick spice plant in the title sequence was always there, beside the waters of the inner harbor with us. The Wire told the world our stories. Like it was for us, about us, and knew us in ways we didn’t know ourselves. We watched to learn who we were. In 2002, when season one aired, I was sixteen years old. I’ve returned to The Wire almost every year since. I’ve aged and moved around but still watch it when I want to see something I understand and when I want to feel understood. I’ve seen Lance Reddick portray Lieutenant Daniels, year after year, in my teens, twenties, and thirties. I’ve gotten to see my inner reaction to his character and performance evolve as I’ve evolved. I hope, in sharing this journey, it will honor his memory. 

As a teenager, Daniels was one of my least favorite characters. Why wouldn’t he be? As an immediate authority figure, he was often in the literal position to bear bad news, to babysit, to tackle boring responsibility boringly. Weren’t street shooters and front-line soldiers on either side of the drug war more dynamic, interesting, and enviable? (Little did I know at the time that this sort of idolized criminal aspiration was part of the problem presented by the show.) The black-and-white thinking of my youth painted Daniels as a corrupt hypocrite. A career man. A politician. A butt-kissing bureaucrat in a suit. To be fair to my younger self, most of these things are mostly true. However, they aren’t—as I now know—the only things at play. Reddick, who was perfectly cast for the role, delivered a pitch perfect performance every moment on the screen. All the way down to his posture, which was never anything less than stiff, rigid, and upright, like Daniels himself. All the way down to his waistline. In those few intimate scenes where we see him shirtless, we get confirmation in the complete absence of belly fat of what we have come to suspect from his high, hollow cheek bones. This man will bode no non-sense in the way that he bodes no body fat. He is disciplined, in constant control, a man who follows protocol. At any moment, in my mind, I can hear Daniels say, “Chain of command, McNulty.”

By my early twenties, with the series ended, I had seen J.D. Williams (who played Body, a teenage drug enforcer) say in the actor’s commentary that the best way for anyone to help his character out would be to help him out, as in literally out of Baltimore. At some level, I knew myself to be some version of him. Having seen what ultimately happened to Body, I took the words to heart and left. I haven’t lived again in Baltimore for some fifteen years. Displaced from home and the only people who could ever understand me, my rewatches became nostalgic and more frequent. I began to understand Daniels as I lived through similar complexities. How you can’t fight the darkness without getting a little on you. In a brilliant non-use of flashback, all of Daniels’ early corruption, being “on the take,” is backstory. Hearsay, just as it would be in real life. I learned from him things a father might teach a young man. How, to be effective in the world, most of your actions, even with good intent, will also have unintended negative consequences. Like when Daniels defends an officer who was clearly in the wrong for assaulting a teenage boy with the butt of his pistol, causing the boy to lose an eye. Watching Daniels anguish over the decision and seek counsel from various sources, I could feel his pain. The cop, a fuck-up, was still a cop, and still his responsibility. The whole experience causes the boy to despise police and become entrenched in the drug violence. Later, when the boy gets arrested, Daniels endures mockery from him but gets his charges rescinded, to no ultimate avail. Just a personal and practical payback for the wrong done him. The cop leaves the force anyway and becomes, of all things, a teacher, who effects good for many youth over years of teaching. Daniels wordlessly reminds the cop, in a happenstance crossing of paths, to stay on the straight and narrow, to not blow this second chance. The cop wordlessly says “yes” and “thank you” and “sorry” and all the things we can never quite tell each other and mean it when the situation hits so close to home. As an actor, Reddick accomplished more with silence than I have ever seen anyone else do: subtle and complex, with an air of gravitas that makes it through the screen and into you.

In a different situation but similar scenario: one of his officers steals money from a drug bust. Rather than report or reprimand him, Daniels only says that the count had better be right when he next counts. There is so much forgiveness and understanding underlying Daniels’ flat, serious tone that the showrunners don’t need to point to Daniels past corruption for us to know it’s in the mix. That he’s advising a younger version of himself to be better than himself. That cop returns the money and later becomes a pillar of the local community, consistently putting himself out there to do the right thing. In these cases, we see the ripple effect that a good man can have in creating other good men, however far down the road. So often, we only see the reproduction of evil or simple triumphs of good. Reddick, as Daniels, gave me faith that goodness creates goodness, in time, even when I don’t see it myself. That, sometimes, you need to treat people like the people they could be in order for them to become them. By my mid-twenties, I still found Daniels serious to the point of being charmless, which I now know poses its own charm: complete and forthright sincerity. Truest honesty is even willing to cast its possessor in a negative light. 

By my thirties, I had become Daniels. A middle manager with pressures and conflicting responsibilities from above and below, with hollow positional empowerment that hindered as much as it helped. Like him, I had been given projects for posterity’s sake, ones where no one cared whether they succeeded. Some that the givers secretly wanted to fail. I had been a scapegoat. I had seen projects I poured my heart into gutted for a fleeting bit of positive press, a photo op, “drugs on the table.” I had worked for supervisors who cared more about appearances than reality. I had lost my share of unwinnable battles. I had seen enough to know that large-scale change was often out of reach, and the best that I could do was the good right in front of me. To play my part, like Daniels, one of the most fully fleshed characters ever brought to the screen. Sure, Reddick had a McArthur grant winner penning his lines, but Reddick gave living, breathing life to fiction. He humanized and actualized a good man in the realest of situations, doing the best he could. No one ever tells you—or, at least, no one ever told me—how much you can suffer for trying to do the right thing. Maybe that’s the measure of a person: How much they’ll suffer for what they believe is right. Because anyone can do the right thing when there’s no pain or punishment, no sacrifice. Now, in my mid-thirties, when I watch The Wire, I see Daniels march proudly, with his eyes open and his mouth shut, straight into career suicide. Because he refuses, time after time, to act in self-interest to the detriment of others, to put his career before the work. And it costs. He loses his wife, who had fallen in love with him for his ambition. He never explains, bears the loss with incredible dignity, and still dresses in uniform to stand beside her in pictures to further her career. We see him relegated to evidence, which everyone knows to be a dead end. Yet he still does it to the best of his ability and somehow still manages to be useful. He fights the good fight; he wins some and loses some, but ultimately keeps his character intact. He opts out of greater positional influence because of what it would cost him and others to get it. Heroic restraint is not easily or often dramatized. Such people often go unsung. But not this one small time.

It's been special for me to witness change in myself by revisiting a performance fixed in time. To be changed by it and change others because of it. If only in this, Lance Reddick lived a life that helped others. He created art that endures after him. And though this article focuses on my personal experience of him in The Wire, he delivered consistently, whether as a voice actor in Destiny, or as Charon in the John Wick series of films. He always seemed to play someone you could count on. Maybe, in that, he wasn’t acting. Thanks for the example, Lance. I know I’ll have you all my life on the screen to follow and admire.