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Isiah Whitlock Jr., an actor who made frequent memorable appearances on the HBO series\u00a0\u201cThe Wire\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cVeep\u201d\u00a0and in five films with director Spike Lee, died Tuesday. He was 71.<\/p>\n
Whitlock’s manager Brian Liebman told The Associated Press in an email that the actor died in New York after a short illness.<\/p>\n
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Whitlock played openly corrupt state Sen. Clay Davis on 25 episodes across the five seasons of \u201cThe Wire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Davis, a fan-favorite character, was known for his profane catchphrase \u2014 \u201csheee-it” \u2014 delivered by Whitlock in moments of triumph and blunt honesty. The actor first used the phrase in his first film with Lee, 2002’s \u201cThe 25th Hour,” when his detective character discovers a cache of drugs hidden in a couch.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big, big, big loss,\u201d Lee said in a phone call with the AP on Tuesday night. \u201cI\u2019m going to miss him for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whitlock went on to appear in four other Lee films, including 2004’s \u201cShe Hate Me,\u201d 2012’s \u201cRed Hook Summer,\u201d 2015’s \u201cChi-Raq,\u201d 2018’s \u201cBlacKkKlansman\u201d and 2020’s \u201cDa 5 Bloods.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe vibed over all those years,\u201d Lee said. \u201cWe clicked from the jump.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee said he has especially sweet memories of the extended time he spent with Whitlock shooting \u201cDa 5 Bloods\u201d on location in Thailand, and he fondly remembered the last time he saw Whitlock \u2014 Lee and his daughter, Satchel, sat with him at a screening of \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman\u201d earlier this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was just a beautiful, beautiful soul,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIf you were around him, he made everybody feel good in his presence. He would radiate. I would put that over his acting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee pointed to Whitlock’s comic talents both on screen and off.<\/p>\n
“He was hilarious,” Lee said. \u201cThat was just his nature, he made people laugh. Everybody was in on the joke.”<\/p>\n
Whitlock is the second significant star of \u201cThe Wire\u201d to die in recent weeks after the death of actor\u00a0James Ransone.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He began appearing in small television guest roles on shows including \u201cCagney and Lacy\u201d in the late 1980s, and he had very small roles in the 1990 films \u201cGoodfellas\u201d and \u201cGremlins 2: The New Batch.”<\/p>\n
After \u201cThe Wire,\u201d Whitlock moved on to another HBO show, the political satire \u201cVeep,\u201d where he played Secretary of Defense George Maddox for three seasons. The character ran against\u00a0Julia Louis-Dreyfus\u00a0\u2032 Selina Meyer in presidential primaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Wire\u201d creator David Simon also paid tribute to Whitlock in a post on Bluesky.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs fine an actor as he was,” Simon said, \u201cIsiah was an even better spirit and the greatest gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source spectrumlocalnews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Isiah Whitlock Jr., an actor who made frequent memorable appearances on the HBO series\u00a0\u201cThe Wire\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cVeep\u201d\u00a0and 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. What You Need To Know Whitlock […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2217346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22793,22694,22800,22804,22691,21741,22695,21737],"class_list":["post-2217345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-all-markets-rank-everywhere","tag-app-arts-entertainment","tag-app-for-your-consideration","tag-associated-press","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-los-angeles-app-region","tag-top-stories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Isiah-Whitlock-Jr-actor-from-The-Wire-Veep-dies-at.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2217347,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217345\/revisions\/2217347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2217346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}