James Ransone, who played Chester “Ziggy” Sabotka in 12 episodes of the second season of “The Wire,” died Friday. He was 46.
The actor’s death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, which listed the cause of death as a suicide.
Ransone’s career also included 20 years of horror and thriller films such as “Sinister” (2012) and “It: Chapter Two” (2019). In a 2019 interview with The Lumberjack, he described himself as an “under-the-radar character actor” and added, ” I’m just a scrappy punk rocker who ended up in this weird, big cultural phenomenon.”
Ransone also named the HBO miniseries “Generation Kill” as his favorite project up to that time.
“I lived in Africa for almost a year shooting that — eight or nine months — and that was so awesome for a number of reasons,” he explained. “I got to spend a lot of time with vets who had just come home from the Iraq War, and my family has a long history of that. We have a lot of veterans in the family. It was just a really big, great, fun adventure that also means a lot, personally.”
Ransone, who grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, dropped out of film school when he was 19 and worked as a photographer throughout his twenties.
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