Michael K. Williams, who starred as Omar Little in The Wire and currently has a role on another dope show, Boardwalk Empire, spoke to MTV News about getting into character for Ol' Dirty Bastard's upcoming biopic, in which he will star.
"I am doing a lot of research on Russell," Williams said. "I had the pleasure of meeting his beautiful mother, Ms. Cherry. We sat down for, like, three hours, and she told me the most amazing stuff about her son and a lot of things that the public didn't know. I've been talking to people who know him well ... people who knew him when the cameras wasn't rolling. I've got a lot of insight into who he was as a human being and as a man and, dare I say it, scholar. The dude was actually quite smart. You have to be able to recite mathematics and be five percent God body — you can't play with that. You have to know what you're talking about. It's a lot of studying, a lot of knowledge."
Although the film will be a drama, they won't be forgetting about ODB's quirks,
"It's drama, but if you know ODB, there's going to be some comedy, but we're not playing to that. It's going to be shot as a straight piece, no buffoonery, for lack of a better word," Williams said. "It's only going to cover the last two years of his life when he was released from prison to the day he died. It's just an insight into what he struggled with in the public eye."