Lance Reddick, iconic actor from ‘The Wire’ and ‘Fringe’, dies at 60

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The actor Lance Reddick, A constant in the best contemporary series, he has died at the age of 60 due to causes not yet revealed. The most remembered role of him and the one that made him famous is Lieutenant Cedric Daniels from ‘The Wire’rare example of decency among the authorities of a degraded Baltimore.

Daniels knew where he was moving: precisely in Baltimore he was born, grew up and began to study not dramatic art, but music, a discipline in which he graduated from the University of Rochester. Already in the early 1990s he entered the Yale School of Dramatic Arts, eventually graduating with a Master of Fine Arts.

After many one-episode jobs, his first big break came in ‘Oz’, HBO series which, unfairly, we tend to forget when we say that ‘The Sopranos’ invented the prestigious series. Already aiming for a professional future based on authority figures, he played the policeman Johnny Basil, infiltrated as a certain Desmond Mobay in the maximum security prison in the center of the action. Like various other ‘Oz’ actors, he was later seen by ‘Lost’: he was Matthew Abaddon, mysterious agent of businessman Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), former leader of The Others. And he went on not straying far from JJ Abrams participating in another of his creations, ‘Fringe (To the limit)’in this case with a more weighty role, that of the head of that FBI team (Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, John Noble) in charge of clarifying inexplicable phenomena.

Near the end of this series we also started to see him in action blockbusters like ‘Assault to power’ and the saga ‘John Wick’in whose four installments he appears (in the last one or the ‘spin-off’ ‘Ballerina’ it will be posthumously) as the concierge at the Continental, the famous hotel for assassins where no one can be killed. In addition, he also made a presence, or rather, an inevitable voice in another emblematic saga of recent pop culture: the ‘Destiny’ video game series from the Bungie studio (the parents of ‘Halo’), in which he lent his imposing tone to one one of its longest-lived and most important characters, Comandante Zavala.

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During the last decade we have seen Reddick return to the so-called small screen with titles of greater (‘Bosch’, a couple of volumes of ‘American horror story’) or somewhat lesser (‘Resident evil’) interest and impact. In all of them he was a fantastic reason to keep watching.

After the news of his death, the tributes of old colleagues have not been long in coming. Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland in ‘The wire’) has defined it on Twitter as “the epitome of class”. Ben Stiller He has recalled that Reddick worked with his mother, Anne Meara, in the play ‘Afterplay’, and that he was “exquisite in it and everything he did”. The tributes only continue to multiply, with all the logic in the world.



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