A chance to be in a film costarring with Matthew Broderick? Michael Kenneth Williams figured someone was calling the wrong number.

So he blew off the first couple of phone messages from representatives of writer-director Joshua Goldin about the film “Wonderful World,” which opens Friday (1/8/10). It was only when Goldin himself reached Williams that the Brooklyn-born actor figured something might actually be up.

“I thought it was a mass call; I got intimidated because it was opposite Matthew Broderick,” Williams recalls, adding that, when he first was notified of the audition, “I thought, I’m not going to waste my time. Then Josh called me back a few times and said he wanted me. So I went in.”

In “Wonderful World,” Williams plays Ibou, Broderick’s roommate, a Senegalese immigrant to whom the unhappily divorced Broderick regularly loses at chess. When Ibou suffers a health crisis, Broderick’s character finds a purpose for his own confused life, fighting city hall on his roommate’s behalf.

Williams worked on his character’s accent while filming Spike Lee’s “Miracle of St. Ann” in Tuscany two years ago: “I befriended a gentleman from Senegal. He taught me a lot about what sort of person this character was, how to pronounce the language. It was a lot of help. That accent was by far my biggest challenge.”

The two characters seem unlikely friends, but, Williams says, “I guess that opposites attract. Plus Matthew’s character needed a roommate, needed the money. They felt each other out and become friends over time.”

And who is actually the superior chess player – him or Broderick?

“I’m a little rusty at chess,” Williams says. “Matthew’s got me by a hair.”

Williams smiles at the memory – and seems tickled simply by the fact that he’s a working actor. It was never part of the plan – not that Williams had a plan when he started. But a fortuitous bit of casting in a critically acclaimed HBO series changed all that.

“To me, that series was an actor’s dream,” Williams, 43, says of “The Wire,” on which he spent five seasons portraying rogue drug dealer Omar Little – a gay gangster with the smarts and the will to go up against the Baltimore drug gangs, carving himself out a piece of the action while building a fearsome rep. “It has increased my work. I’m very blessed.”

That show, which aired from 2002-2008, launched Williams from being music-video background dancer and bit-part extra to establishing himself as an actor. He currently has two films in theaters (“Wonderful World” and “The Road”) and another awaiting release (Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime”), with two others wending their way through post-production.

Yet Williams drifted into his 20s before he figured out what he wanted to do.

“I didn’t really choose acting,” he says. “Theater chose me. It’s not about the money and I never thought I was all that talented. But the arts were always part of me. It was the first thing I found as an adult that held my attention.

“Before that, I never finished anything. I wasn’t a gangster but I was definitely a knucklehead, doing dumb shit. By the time I started acting, I was dancing in music videos. I was happy doing background dancing, doing whatever. When I found the world of theater, I fell in love. I found out what it meant to be a thespian. I got into the theater world when I saw where it could take me.”

When Williams smiles, it’s easy to ignore the distinctive scar that virtually transects his face. But the scar – the byproduct of a bar fight involving razors on Williams’ 25^th birthday – turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong words were exchanged,” Williams says. “Just a typical day in New York. I’m blessed that it didn’t take my eye out or make it to my jugular. I went from being the bald-headed dude to the bald-headed dude with the scar.”

Which brought him to the attention of casting directors and stars: The late Tupac Shakur reportedly pulled Williams’ mugshot out of a pile and said, “This guy!”, helping Williams win his first film role in 1996’s “Bullet.”

But it was “The Wire” that established Williams – not just as an actor but as one of the fans’ favorite characters on the show. With his laidback demeanor, eye-for-an-eye ethic and refusal to back down from any challenge, Omar Little cut a swath through the Baltimore of “The Wire,” calmly wielding a double-barrel shotgun while whistling a haunting little ditty that sounded an awful lot like “The Farmer in the Dell.” But no, says Williams: He had another song in mind.

“I like to think of it as the old Looney Tunes, where Elmer Fudd was whistling, ‘A-hunting we will go’,” he says. “To me, that embodied the state of mind of Omar.”

Williams put his audition on tape when he heard “The Wire” was casting – and didn’t meet the show’s creator, David Simon, until he was a few days into the first week of shooting.

“When I met David Simon, he said, ‘I wish we’d known who Omar would be with you playing him - too bad we’ve got to kill you off after seven episodes’,” Williams recalls.

But Omar survived until the third-to-last episode of the series, through almost the entire five seasons.

“Why didn’t they kill him off like they planned? I never asked,” Williams shrugs. “My mom said, Never look a gift horse in the mouth. From week to week, you didn’t know who was going to get it. It was like Russian roulette every time you opened the script. It kept me on my toes.”

Omar’s death – shot in the head in a convenience store by a gun-wielding tween – provided a tough day of filming, Williams recalls.

“That day on the set was crazy. They got my trailer as close to the set as they could. Everybody in the ’hood in Baltimore felt something was going to happen. Baltimore is not a star-struck-type city. But this day, the corners were packed. It was like they knew this was going down.”

Sitting in his trailer after finishing the scene, still wearing makeup that made it look as though his brains had been blown out, Williams says, “I looked at myself in the mirror and for a quick moment, I started to mourn this character. I spent a lot of time with this dude. Then this lady from wardrobe saw me and gave me a hug and said, ‘Shake it off.’ It got intense for a minute; if I’d started to cry, it would have been a long cry. But the feeling was, We are not going to mourn a TV show character. It was just a day at the office.”

Still, Williams is always pleasantly surprised when strangers stop him to tell him how much they loved the show – and Omar, in particular.

“I was shocked at how popular he was,” he says. “I hoped the character was well-received. I think people thought he was a man with a code. You didn’t have to worry about cheap shots with Omar. You may not have respected what he was about, but he had a code of ethics.”

Omar was a stone-cold killer – but Williams has no worries about being pigeonholed as an actor. He’s wracked up more than 30 film and TV credits since being cast in “The Wire,” in roles as diverse as a uniformed police officer in Ben Affleck’s “Gone Baby Gone,” a relationship-challenged suburbanite in “Life During Wartime” and a scavenging survivor (who is forced to strip naked by Viggo Mortensen) in “The Road.”

“I don’t worry about typecasting,” Williams says. “I just want to stay working steady. If a character is authentic, if it’s something I can feel, I’ll do it. I don’t feel I’m being typecast. I’ve been consistently swinging from one vine to another. Being a steady working actor is a huge accomplishment. As long as the work is good and real and believable, I’ll do it.”

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