Mother Jones: What do you say to kids who say they want to be like Omar?

Michael Kenneth Williams: I say, "No, you don't. No you don't." Nobody wants to be like Omar. Take his good qualities. Take his heart, take his kindness, take the self-respect that he has for himself as far as what he would not do. Take those qualities and adapt them into your life. But make no mistake, Omar was definitely a man in a lot of pain, a lot of emotional pain. He was a man that woke up one morning and was like "Oh, shit." Omar is a person that all hope was snatched from. All hope for anything better in life was snatched completely out of him, and that was what was left.

But make no error, there was the potential that this man had—he could've been president of the United States. We could've been saying President Little with no problem had he had the opportunity and the exposure.

MJ: Speaking of presidents, President Obama, back when he was a candidate, said you were his favorite character on his favorite show.

MKW: When he said that it gave me an insight into him as a human being. What it said to me, and not because I was on the show or anything like that, was that this is a man who really has his finger on the pulse of what's really wrong in this country. Because a lot of people won't allow The Wire in their homes because they don't want to look at that. They don't want to deal with those people, they don't want to give those people a voice that the show spoke for; they'd rather act like that don't exist. So when you have the future president of the United States not only acknowledging a show like The Wire but a character like mine, it let me know that he has his finger on the pulse of what's wrong in this country.