James Ransone, actor known for The Wire, dies at 46

LOS ANGELES - James Ransone, a character actor who starred in Season 2 of The Wire (2003) and appeared in horror films including It Chapter Two (2019) and The Black Phone (2021), died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 46.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death and, according to the office’s website, was investigating it as a suicide.

Representatives for Ransone did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Ransone was born in 1979 in Baltimore, an advantage in the early 2000s when The Wire, then a little-watched drama on HBO, was looking to cast actors from the city for the show’s second season.

Ransone was living in New York at the time and knew of The Wire, which focused largely on a group of Baltimore drug dealers and the police officers pursuing them, from having seen subway posters advertising the show. A friend, actor Leo Fitzpatrick, had appeared in a couple of episodes.

“You have to remember, no one cared about that show until the fourth season,” Ransone said in a 2016 interview. “I was 21 or 22, and it was probably my third legit job and definitely the biggest.”

Ransone played Chester “Ziggy” Sobotka as a brash though inept dock worker and petty criminal whose decisions frustrate his father, Frank Sobotka, a respected union leader played by Chris Bauer. Ransone’s scenes included accompanying a live duck to a bar and donning a prosthetic penis.

Bauer once called Ransone one of the inspirations in his life.

“We have a deep friendship, and I have benefited from his engrossment with how he lives his life and puzzles with creative growth,” Bauer wrote in an email in 2016. “And we built such trust throughout the season.”

He went on: “There’s a scene where I confront him about stealing cameras from the dock. As Ziggy, he greets me warmly and I slap him hard on the top of the head, and it looks so real, cuz it’s exactly what I did.”

Bauer added, “You can’t do that with any actor.”

The Wire, which was created by David Simon, who was once a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, was one of the early prestige shows on television. Though The Wire was slow to attract viewers, it is now regularly cited among television’s greatest shows.

“Because there was such a delay in the time from when it came out to when it became popular, it didn’t give me a lot of business opportunities,” Ransone said in 2016. “And then I was also playing sort of like a really dislikable character for 90 per cent of the time that you’re watching them.”

After The Wire, Ransone made frequent appearances in other shows Simon made for HBO, including Treme (2010-2013) set in New Orleans, and Generation Kill (2008) a miniseries about the Iraq War.

Ransone’s IMDb page lists nearly 80 acting credits, including the television shows Poker Face (2023-2025), Low Winter Sun (2013) and Mosaic (2018). He often portrayed layered characters with troubled backstories.

As a teenager, Ransone attended the George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Towson, Maryland, according to his website, and he later briefly studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In 2021, Ransone disclosed in a post on Instagram that he had been sexually abused as a child, and he accused a former tutor of repeatedly assaulting him in the early 1990s. He wrote that he had endured a “lifetime of shame and embarrassment” from the abuse.

As an adult, he struggled with substance abuse. “He nearly destroyed his life with heroin,” according to his website, “but got clean in 2006.” NYTIMES