Michael Kenneth Williams

  b. 1966 | American actor

At The Bottom

— 1991

"I was going happily in the direction the universe was taking me," Williams remembers, when the bar attack changed everything.

As he bled from two long gashes in his face and neck, Michael Kenneth Williams was unsure if he would live to see the next day.  It was Williams’ 25th birthday, and his friends had just rushed him to a Brooklyn hospital after he’d been attacked outside a bar where they were celebrating the occasion.  Outside the bar entrance, one of Williams’ friends had been surrounded by a group of men who were attempting to rob him.  As he told an interviewer years later, “I stuck my nose in [and] the gentlemen didn’t take too kindly to me sticking my nose in their business.”  They attacked him instead, slashing him with razor blades and putting his budding career, if not his life, in danger.  Williams — who had grown up in a rough Brooklyn housing project — had been pursuing a career as a dancer and model and had recently begun getting small jobs dancing in music videos and modeling hip hop fashion.  “I was going happily in the direction the universe was taking me,” Williams remembers, when the bar attack changed everything. Even with plastic surgery, he would likely have permanent scarring.