Growing up, Michael K Williams was bullied for being soft, fragile, and a “cream puff”. On his 25th birthday, everything changed.
Williams often stated how he felt out of place in a very alpha-male community and found solace in drugs and short stints as a black-up dancer.
Williams was at the club in Queens and stepped outside to gets some air when he saw his friends were about to get in a fight. He narrated that he tried to break up the brawl, and how one man kept pacing behind him.
In his own words
“He kept like, you know, like sucking his teeth, and I’m looking, i’m like yo, so what’s up dude? Yo bro, what’s your problem?
And the dude wiped his hands across his mouth and just- what I thought appeared to be smacked me, but what did he spit razor. He was positioning the razor in his mouth to get between his middle finger and his ring finger and then he went – swiped me down my face, and this cut my face”.
After this incident, movie directors started hiring Williams to play the role of thugs and gangsters, and while it took a long time to be able to look at himself in the mirror, the scar changed the way people saw and treated him.