The actor Lance Reddick, who has died suddenly aged 60, played figures of authority with such panache that no matter how many times he was handed such roles, he never seemed typecast. He is best known on film for his part as Charon, the all-seeing fixer in the John Wick movie franchise, but his image was forged playing two ambitious high-level cops on television, Cedric Daniels in The Wire (2002-08) and Irvin Irving in Bosch (2014-21).
In each case he was contrasted with a main character: his anguish at the plight of Baltimore as portrayed in The Wire was expressed with internal restraint, opposed to the knee-jerk reactions of Dominic West’s chronic screw-up, McNulty. In Bosch, he was the politician tormented by Titus Welliver’s relentlessly uncompromising Harry Bosch.
