BALTIMORE — The Baltimore-born actor Lance Reddick could converse knowledgeably about the difference between hiring a doula and a midwife for help during childbirth. In high school, he dropped out of football — a sport at which he excelled — because it might interfere with his dream of playing and composing classical piano. For years, he began his daily workout routine by completing 200 pushups and 100 situps, according to longtime friends.
“Lance was continually trying to become the best man he could be,” a childhood friend, James A. Lutz said. “He had that quality in high school. And he talked about it a few weeks ago in the last communication I had with him.”
Reddick had occasionally mentioned having underlying health problems, according to another friend, Quinn Stills. The 60-year-old actor collapsed in his Los Angeles backyard on March 17 while engaged in his daily early morning workout routine. His body was discovered by his wife, Stephanie.
Lutz and Stills saw aspects of their friend in the characters he portrayed: Lt. Cedric Daniels on “The Wire”; Charon, the hotel concierge who led a double life in the “John Wick” movies; Commander Zavala in the wildly popular "Destiny" video games: All were upright men with a strong moral backbones. They were multifaceted, intelligent and complex.
Baltimore viewers can watch Reddick in one of his defining roles this weekend. “John Wick: Chapter 4″ opened Friday in movie theaters nationwide.
“Lance was a Renaissance man,” said Stills, who met the 4-year-old future star in the late 1960s when both were enrolled in Miss Redmond’s Nursery School. They later attended The Wilkes School at Grace & St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and finally Friends School of Baltimore.
“When I would turn on the TV and see him playing some tough detective, that was hilarious to me,” said Stills, now a Los Angeles investment adviser.
“This is a guy who was a voracious reader, a guy who performed two public concerts at an elite private school, a guy who was taking high-level calculus and eating it for breakfast. He was a giant, and not just on the screen.”
‘There were a lot of things he wanted to do’
Reddick was born June 7, 1962, as the youngest of two sons to Solomon Reddick, a public defender, and Dorothy Gee Reddick, a teacher. The family lived in a middle-class neighborhood in north Baltimore just east of Charles Street.
According to Lutz, the city where Reddick grew up and the high school he attended were hugely influential in his development.
“Baltimore and Friends created an environment where we could seek out and explore,” said Lutz, a geologist who studies the futures of forests at Utah State University.
“You might call it a safe space. They helped make Lance the good person that he was. They taught us that we live in a society where some people are fortunate, some people are less fortunate, and we needed to consider that in our journey through life.”
As a boy, Reddick’s most readily apparent talent was his musical ability. He had a beautiful singing voice, Stills said ― but that came second to his piano technique. Stills said the 6-foot-2 Reddick quit the football team to the considerable dismay of the Friends School coach because he was afraid he would injure his fingers, ending his musical career before it had begun.
“He had a really soft touch on the piano,” Lutz said. “He knew how to make music come alive with emotion.”
After graduating from Friends, Reddick enrolled in the University of Rochester’s prestigious Eastman School of Music, only to drop out with dreams of becoming a rock star like his idol Sting. He later returned to the school, earning a bachelor’s degree.
“Typical Lance,” Stills said. “He was brilliant, but there were a lot of things he wanted to do.”
Though he later found his calling as an actor, Reddick’s passion for music persisted his entire life. The Baltimore actress Maria Broom, who played his TV wife on “The Wire,” recalls that during breaks in filming, Reddick enjoyed discussing music and movies.
“When you’re on the set you have a lot of time to talk in between scenes,” Broom said. “He talked about working on his CD.”
Reddick released his jazz-pop album, “Contemplations & Remembrances” in 2007. The album contains nine of Reddick’s original compositions and he also supplied the vocals.
The actor also stood out from his colleagues — literally — on “The Wire” set.
“Lance had an unbelievably erect posture at all times,” Broom said. “He always stood ramrod straight.”
She later learned that was a result of a severe back injury that Reddick had suffered in the early 1990s.
Married and the father of a 3-year-old daughter, Reddick was working three jobs to make ends meet: a double shift waiting tables and a third gig delivering newspapers, according to an interview he gave Variety magazine in 2019. One day he bent over the wrong way to pick up a heavy stack of papers and ended up bedridden. That convinced him he needed to find a new career fast.
‘He had high standards’
Reddick had acted occasionally at Friends School, and on a whim applied to the Yale School of Drama. No one was more surprised than he was when he was admitted, especially considering the caliber of that class, which included Paul Giamatti, the future Oscar nominee and the star of Showtime’s “Billons.” Reddick earned a master’s degree from Yale in 1994.
“That changed his whole life,” Stills said. “Lance was this gifted intellect, but he was not this stuck-up bookworm. He had high standards, and that made him humble.”
Soon after graduating that Reddick began getting cast in television shows. Initially, he had small roles as drug addicts. Two big career breaks came a few years apart: his role as undercover police officer Johnny Basil (aka Desmond Mobay) in HBO’s “Oz” in 1997 and in 2002 as Cedric Daniels on “The Wire,” a police lieutenant who fought to balance his scruples and political ambitions.
Other memorable roles included fixer Matthew Abaddon on the NBC series “Lost,” special agent Phillip Broyles in “Fringe” for the Fox television network and Chief Irvin Irving in Amazon Studio’s “Bosch.”
Reddick also gained a younger and passionate new set of fans by providing the voice for the character of Commander Zavala in the "Destiny" video game franchise.
“Lance was important for a lot of reasons,” said Ana Rodney, founder and director of MOMCares, a Baltimore nonprofit that aims to combat the high mortality rate among Black mothers and infants by providing supportive services including free baby care essentials and transportation to medical appointments.
Reddick’s wife, Stephanie, posted a message on Instagram March 18 requesting that donations be made to MOMCares, an organization her husband had supported for the past four years.
“I am humbled that Lance thought so highly of us,” Rodney said.
“He continues to be important for a lot of reasons. I’ve already had two or three players from the video gaming community reach out about setting up fundraising events in his honor.”
Rodney met Reddick after she was selected as a 2019 Baltimore Homecoming Hero. At the awards ceremony, Reddick approached and offered to help MOMCares.
“Lance already knew that a doula and a midwife do different things,” Rodney said.
“He could talk about water births and the different options for natural, holistic births. Lance was a genuinely, kind, generous, giving person. There wasn’t any pretense about him in the way you would expect from someone having that level of notoriety.”
Rodney estimated that “conservatively $30,000″ had been donated to MOMCares within five days of Reddick’s death, or more than 3% of her agency’s annual operating budget.
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