Anthem magazine called James Ransone “the perennial cool guy”, though it wasn’t quite that simple. Ransone, who has taken his own life aged 46, was a coiled, wiry actor whose remorseless stare and brooding good looks were complicated by a jangling vulnerability.
He was a stalwart of modern horror, cropping up in a string of lucrative shockers. The most successful, with a box-office gross of more than $450m, was It Chapter Two (2019), which completed a two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a group of friends terrorised since childhood by a murderous clown.
Also in the horror genre, Ransone was on the side of law enforcement in Prom Night (2008), Sinister (2012) and Sinister 2 (2015), played a campus groundskeeper murdered by a cult in Kristy (2014) and the brother of a serial child killer known as the Grabber in The Black Phone (2022) and Black Phone 2 (2025).
He made his name in season two of The Wire, David Simon’s dense, Baltimore-set crime drama, which was nominated by this paper in 2019 as the second greatest television show of the century so far.
Ransone, just 22 at the time and a Baltimore native himself, brought a contradictory mix of volatility and dopiness to the role of Ziggy, the loose-cannon son of a stevedore who tries his hand ineptly at a series of criminal schemes. Each one, from drug dealing to car theft, ends in disaster and ignominy. Humiliated for the umpteenth time after a deal goes wrong, Ziggy lashes out and commits murder. He then waits, defeated, for the police to arrive.
The slow-burn appeal of The Wire meant that, although the second season was broadcast in 2003, it took many years to percolate down through popular culture. “There was a six-year delay from when I shot it to when the show went into the zeitgeist,” Ransone recalled in 2016. “People would be like, ‘Ziggy!’ and I’d be like, ‘What?!’ It was just weird.”
He played an even bigger part in Simon’s next series, Generation Kill (2008), set during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which he was a garrulous corporal. He also appeared as a chef in 10 episodes of Treme (2010-13), another Simon drama, set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “James is made for an absurdist, comedic rant in whatever universe we place him,” said Simon. “But then, he can turn on a dime and break your heart.”
For some time, The Wire remained a double-edged sword. “I had no idea that, eight years later, people would say The Wire is the greatest TV show that’s ever been made,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “You might think it might serve my ego, but it scares the shit out of me, like, ‘Oh, I hit my high watermark.’”
Nevertheless, he was increasingly prized by innovative film-makers including Spike Lee and Sean Baker. Lee cast him in the heist thriller Inside Man (2008), the Brooklyn-set drama Red Hook Summer (2012) and a remake of the Korean revenge thriller Oldboy (2013).
In Baker’s delightful Tangerine (2015), shot entirely on an iPhone on the streets of Los Angeles, Ransone brought grubby, roguish charm to his role as a pimp whose infidelity to his girlfriend, a trans sex worker, sets the runaway plot in motion. He also played a porn actor in the director’s previous film, Starlet (2012).
Ransone expressed a natural affinity for such auteurs. For John Waters, he played Dingy Dave, who is turned on by licking tyres and eating the contents of ashtrays, in the sex comedy A Dirty Shame (2004). He also worked with Steven Soderbergh on the television thriller Mosaic (2018) and Rian Johnson on the comic mystery series Poker Face (2025). “Show me an artist who has a distinct vision and I’ll fall in line like a soldier every time,” he said.
Even before The Wire, Ransone gave notice of the species of actor he intended to be by starring in Ken Park (2002) as Tate, a young man who murders his grandparents. Sex in Larry Clark and Ed Lachman’s scandalous film was not simulated, and the scenes in which Ransone’s character experiments with auto-erotic asphyxiation left nothing to the imagination. Reflecting on his undaunted approach, Ransone later said: “Fear is the cancer to creativity.”
That could make for a challenging life. “I still wrestle with the catharsis of acting. I don’t end up playing a lot of likeable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikeable skin. As a result of that, I don’t always feel good.”
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Joyce (nee Petersen) and James Finley Ransone II, he was known throughout his life to friends as PJ. This became one way to differentiate between friendly and unfriendly callers who phoned him at home. “If it’s, like, a police officer, I’m like, ‘Oh, this person knows my formal name but they don’t know me personally.’”
After a spell at a traditional high school proved unproductive, Ransone Jr auditioned successfully for the George Washington Carver Centre for Arts and Technology in Towson, Maryland, where he specialised in theatre and then fine art.
He briefly studied film at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997, but got expelled for non-attendance. He found employment taking pictures with the photographer Patrick McMullan for Interview magazine, then quit when he began landing acting jobs.
Most recently, Ransone was seen briefly in Black Phone 2 and in an episode of Poker Face where he played a thief who shoots a man dead, dresses the body as Santa Claus and conceals it in a shop’s Christmas display.
In 2021, he posted on social media a detailed letter he had sent to a former teacher whom he accused of sexually abusing him when he was 12; no charges were brought.
In the post he said this led to him later becoming a heroin addict, though he had been clean since attending rehab in 2006. At the time of quitting, he revealed in 2015, he had also been contemplating killing himself: “Drugs couldn’t silence the noise in my head anymore.”
Ransone is survived by his wife, Jamie McPhee, and their children, Jack and Violet.
• James Ransone (James Finley Ransone III), actor, born 2 June 1979; died 19 December 2025
