The Wire and It: Chapter Two actor James Ransone has died. He was 46.
Ransone died on Friday, December 19, by suicide, according to County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner records viewed by Us Weekly.
Ransone is survived by his wife, Jamie McPhee, and their two children.
While Ransone kept his home life private, he had previously been candid about his journey as an actor.
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“I did not fit in well with all of the kids. Adolescence was a really hard time for me — as I think it is for most kids,” Ransone recalled to Interview magazine in 2016. “It’s so uncomfortable. With normal public schools, I used to have a really hard time with them. Then my mom found this school. She was like, ‘Hey, they’re opening this arts school. You can go. You have to audition.’”
He added, “I think it saved me as a kid. Going to arts school saved me.”
After graduating from high school, Ransone continued his training at New York’s The School of the Visual Arts before landing a string of roles on TV and film.
“I still wrestle with the catharsis of acting. I don’t end up playing a lot of likable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikable skin,” he admitted to Interview. “As a result of that I don’t always feel good. I get a lot more catharsis from taking pictures or painting or making short films. You have some control.”
Ransone continued, “I think all art — if it’s good — is a result of really trying to create something that you can’t put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.”
Ransone especially found filming Generation Kill to be “a highlight of [his] life.”
“Living in Africa, being around the dudes who were being written about — since my dad is a Vietnam vet,” he told the outlet. “Being around these marines who had fought in war and they were young, I got to see some version of my dad as a young man. A lot of things started to make sense to me in a different way. I became really close with Evan Wright, the guy who wrote the book [the series was based on], and I became really close with some of the marines. It didn’t do so much for my career but it shaped me and the way that I think about my life.”
According to Ransone, the experience allowed him to see and understand an “entirely different part of the world.”
“Seeing a different level of suffering and a different level of happiness and joy that was not an American experience,” he said. “That made me think about politics and world history in a different way. Listening to men who went off to fight in a war share their experiences in a way that I think would make most people uncomfortable.”
Three years later, Ransone classified himself as an “under-the-radar character actor” while ruminating on his legacy in the film industry.
“I’m just a scrappy, punk rocker who ended up in this weird, big cultural phenomenon,” he told Jack Central in 2019 of joining the It franchise. “That’s what I’d say if I had to summarize 20 years worth of work.”
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