Portraits from The Wire Paintball Tournament: Marlo, Kima, and Bodie in Shooting Gear

all portraits by Paul Quitoriano

Marlo! With a beard! Smiling!

A paintball tournament with cast members from The Wire sounded like one of the best id-fulfilling charity events ever, even better than a five-martini lunch with Sterling-Cooper executives. (Though maybe not as a good as a strip-club field trip with the Sopranos.) So when the announcement went out that Jamie Hector, the actor who brought to life ruthless young kingpin Marlo Stanfield, had organized a Cops and Robbers face-off between "The Streets" and "The Law" in Long Island City, count us as one of the many Internet-nerds/box-set owners very excited about such a prospect.

Flyers for the early-morning charity competition--staged to benefit Hector's arts-minded youth-mentoring charity Moving Mountains--advertised participants as the man behind Marlo, Michael K. Williams (Omar! Alive!), Snoop Pearson (Snoop!), Sonia Sohn (Detective Kima Greggs), Anwan Glover (Slim Charles), Seth Gilliam (Carver), "and more." But things didn't go exactly as promised. Snoop was supposedly caught in traffic. Glover was a no-show despitepromoting his involvement on Twitter. Williams was on the premises, but apparently sat at a table with a barking dog and kept to himself, except for those ballsy enough to ask for a Facebook profile photo. Like Gabe from Stereogum, who posted about how awkward the whole thing was:

The thing about being near famous people is that it is really fun and neat and exciting for about 20 minutes, after which you are just in a room with some strangers who do not particularly like you, but at whom you cannot stop staring. Yikes. Add to that the fact that it is usually very hard to disassociate their screen roles from them as human beings, and now you are in a room full of strangers who do not particularly like you and who you think are ACTUAL MURDERERS. But Jaime Hector and Sonia Sohn were very nice. Bodie was there, too, and he was super Bodie the whole time. I'm pretty sure he was for real running a corner during the event.

Hector and Sohn were the only two of the aforementioned who actually messed around with paintball, with J.D. Williams (Bodie) as an unannounced, but very welcome, addition. In the end, a five-man team sponsored by Def Jam got to the finals and our photographer Paul Quitoriano shot these awesome portraits.

Sonia Sohn

Bodie!