We recently connected with Omari Williams and have shared our conversation below.
Omari, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
A little over a year ago I was able to string together some projects that were more or less creatively satisfying and one project that was extremely lucrative and long-standing. It all began around April or May of 2022 when I had just finished performing on a podcast that specializes in bringing new plays to an audio medium, Premiere the Play Podcast. I had worked with the company in the past and was excited to work with them again. As an actor, you’re constantly auditioning during projects like these to make sure the gap between jobs is small, and as I mentioned before, I was able to book 3 plays almost back-to-back to keep the creative juices flowing. Theater has not been the most financially stable work I’ve done, but it was certainly fulfilling in a way I hadn’t felt since diving into film and television. Through an open call, I landed another show after these 3, but in a much longer and higher paying job, the Stranger Things Experience. This live, immersive show ran for about 4 months, with 2 months rehearsal. All paid! Something I hadn’t had before professionally. Ecstatic about my first ever live interactive show, very different than traditional theater, I dove right into the set of characters I was tasked with playing. Being 1 of 6 full-time actors in a cast of nearly 30, I was going to be on-site 5 times a week in varying capacities. I was pretty much set within the first months of rehearsals, and off to living the life of a full-time actor. Of course, I was still auditioning for the far future, but for the first time in years, I didn’t actually NEED to.
Omari, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Omari Williams and I am a Los Angeles based actor/voice actor who has been out in the Valley for 8 years. I’ve performed in all sorts of creative avenues, including stage, film, television, immersive, audio dramas, voice over, commercials, and even a bit of animation. Something that I am interested in is the fantasy and sci-fi genre. Not a crazy genre to like, but I think what sets me apart is that there aren’t a lot of people of color in these genres. Most of the big ticket items in these genres don’t tend to have much diversity in their properties, and I hope to bring about change in these areas as a performer and fan. I am a huge nerd and I think there is something to be said about the intersectionality between nerd-dom and living as a POC that has yet to be explored.
Something that I’m most proud of is the work I did as a performer in the Stranger Things Experience while it toured Los Angeles. We were tasked with 3 different characters and I think the choices I made as each one were substantially different to one another while also being a fun person to interact with guests with. Though being a timed performance, I feel I was able to bring enough memorable moments with the performances I did to make it worthwhile for both myself and the guests that came through.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is by far the collaboration. Whether that is with the cast members or the audience makes no difference to me. The audience becomes the final cast member once rehearsals are over and done with. Coming together at the beginning and reading words on a page together, and making them mean something between other cast members is something I will never get tired of. Though the show can be done thousands of times, the unique experience with the actors of THAT TIME will always be different than the next time it’s done. That goes especially for when the audience becomes that final member. Every performance is different and there is a learning experience that constantly changes with each one.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Something that I feel myself striving for these past few years is inclusion to the point where it’s no longer seen as just a diversity hire, but normalcy. As a person of color, I, as I’m sure of many others, am often labeled as a black actor, which can pigeonhole me into certain types of roles and looks. I want to be seen as an actor who is black, the difference being that I am here to tell any story, but I can also tell specific stories that others may not be able to tackle. The problem with the first label is that often there is no intersectionality. I’m either only tasked with black stories, or I’m tasked with generic stories in which my race plays no factor at all, but neither is true of our world. I’m constantly walking the “line” between the two and I think the media we consume should reflect it. Some people are fine doing one or the other, but then our society sees it as a monolithic experience and it feeds into a narrative that has been in place for centuries. We’ve needed change for a while, but I think it’s even more possible now because people are opening up to these stories of experiences they might not have ever known about.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.omariwilliams.com
- Instagram: @humanjukebox107
- Twitter: @humanjukebox107
Image Credits
John Lauri, Theatre of NOTE, Antonio Zapiain Luna, Daniel Sundler, Fever, Art of Acting Studio