As an actor in the D.C. theater scene, Delaney Williams was always getting the part one casting director called “the sheriff role.”

That didn’t change when Williams — probably best known for his role as slovenly Baltimore cop Jay Landsman on The Wire — began working in television and film in the late 1990s, a career he has maintained for decades while living in the D.C. region.

Born in D.C. and raised in Takoma Park, Williams attended a rival Montgomery County public high school to the ones attended by The Wire showrunner David Simon and writer (and erstwhile District political candidate endorser) George Pelecanos. He’s teamed up with the duo yet again for We Own This City, a new HBO series based on a book of the same name that details the corruption of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. Williams plays, you guessed it, a Baltimore cop.

“There’s a lot of police. There’s a lot of Teamsters. There’s a lot of authority figures. There’s a lot of people that you want to hit with your car or push off of the building,” he says. “You can look at my theater resume, and my film and television resume, and you can go back 40 years and you can go, ‘Yeah, I don’t see a single hero on here. I don’t see a single good guy on here.’ ” (Though Williams is chatty, like some of his most well-known characters, any similarity ends there. At no point during our conversations did I want to push him off a building.)

How has it been to reunite with Simon and Pelecanos once more? “Sensational,” says Williams. “You hope that the material you work on is going to be life-changing. And every time for the last 20 years I get a chance to work with David and George, it’s been that way.”

Williams has a knack for embodying men in uniform who seem like shmucks, but then later reveal a layer of complexity. Take Landsman, a  police sergeant who typifies middle management sloth, constantly seen with a sandwich in one hand and a pornographic magazine in the other. Yet, through the course of five seasons, Williams and Wire writers wove a character with surprising moments of insight and depth.

From the stage to the screen

D.C. has birthed and raised many famous actors, among them Taraji P. Henson and Williams’ fellow We Own This City star Jon Bernthal. But once bitten by the acting bug, most decamp for Los Angeles or New York City, where opportunities are more plentiful.

Williams took a different path. Aside from a brief undergraduate stint in North Carolina, he never really left the region.

But it’s tough to hack it as a full-time stage actor in the District. For awhile, Williams worked at then-regional chain Crown Books, as well as at a bank in Alexandria, where he eventually ended up managing the branch. After those day jobs, he would cap off his evenings with rehearsals or live theater performances.

Williams still considers his time on stage in D.C. among his most formative and rewarding, including starring in plays for Woolly Mammoth, Source Theatre, and Arena Stage.

“We were working in burned out buildings on 14th Street back in the eighties,” he says. “My favorite performance and the best work I feel I’ve ever done was on stage in D.C.,” as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge. 

But his day work meant that he often had to turn down higher-paying union acting jobs, so he and his then-wife decided he would pursue acting full time.

“My wife and I were starting a family, which I don’t think this is the best time to leave your your your steady, full-time career job that you’ve moved up in and jump into a career in the theater,” he says. But the promise of television work, which pays better and is less time-consuming than nightly performances, made it a risk worth taking.

“And of course, as soon as I left, the work stopped,” he continues. “I got nothing in television or theater for a while.” Especially because Williams’ “sheriff” typecasting meant there were only a couple of local stage roles each season that he could hope to land, he had to cross his fingers that the plays featuring those parts didn’t overlap.

To decamp or not to decamp

When he quit the bank job, he imagined that maybe his career would take off and he would head to Hollywood or the Big Apple, or that it wouldn’t, and he would stay in the D.C. area. What he didn’t expect is the hybrid that has comprised his life for the past 20 years. After his marriage dissolved, he and his wife shared custody of the kids, so he wasn’t eager to make a move.

He has no regrets about putting his kids first, but acknowledges that having the D.C. region as a home base has made it harder in the world of acting.

“For a long time, I’ve had to try and convince producers who want the actor who can hop on the subway and be there in a half an hour to travel me and put me up in a hotel and hire me that way,” Williams says. Now that his children are in their twenties, “it’s easier for me to move. And now I don’t want to move because this is my home.”

But some producers are clearly willing to pony up, and Williams credits his work in the region, from the handful of Baltimore-based shows helmed by Simon, starting with a role in the final season of Homicide: Life On The Street, as well as two John Waters films, for opening those doors.

Even with that success, there’s a familiar door he’d like to step back through after a years-long pause. Williams is feeling the itch to get back on stage, especially as he watches his old friends and colleagues from the local theater scene posting on social media about their forthcoming shows.

“It’s a thrilling idea,” he says. “I think I want to do that again. Hey D.C. theater community, I’m here.”