SMSU Alumnus Isiah Whitlock Jr. '76 Dies at 71

Published Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Isiah Whitlock Jr. visited SMSU in April 2025

SMSU Alumnus, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Class of 1976, passed away on Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025 in New York City after a brief illness. Whitlock was born in South Bend, Indiana on Sept. 13, 1954. He attended Southwest Minnesota State University on a football scholarship but after injuries ended his athletic career, he auditioned for a part in the theatre program’s production of “The Crucible.” His website said, “from then on, [he] was proverbially shot out of a cannon.” He got his first break with a guest role on “Cagney and Lacey” in 1987. He had a small but memorable roles in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” with Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta, as well as Disney’s “Enchanted” with Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey. Whitlock collaborated on several movies with Spike Lee going back to 2002 with “25th Hour” and most recently “Da 5 Bloods.” He appeared in recurring roles on “The Veep” with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and “Your Honor” with Brian Cranston. His most recent role was in early 2025 as police chief Larry Dokes in Shonda Rhimes-produced “The Residence,” a Netflix comedy/mystery mini-series. He is best known for his role as Senator Clay Davis in HBO’s “The Wire.” Whitlock received the SMSU Alumni Achievement Award in 2004. In 2016, he established the Whitlock Endowment with the SMSU Foundation. He frequently returned to SMSU to connect with students in the theatre program. He visited Marshall in April 2025 to attend an alumni reunion hosted by the SMSU Theatre Program.

Below is an article by SMSU English Professor, Dr Ruthe Thompson, published in the Spring 2007 edition of SMSU Focus magazine:

SMSU Grad Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (1976) credits Southwest with inspiring and motivating successful film, stage and television career

It’s a long way from South Bend, Indiana, to starring roles in New York theater, a series regular on the hit HBO series “The Wire,” recurring characters on television shows such as "Law and Order" and "The Chapelle Show", and most recently as the Dad ‘who got

hosed’, in Verizon’s 2006 holiday commercial. Whitlock can claim starring roles in films directed by Martin Scorsese, David Mamet and Spike Lee, and SMSU graduate Isiah Whitlock, Jr. has found success as a professional actor, but credits the Southwest theatre department for giving him his start.

“Southwest prepared me,” the 1976 theatre and speech communications graduate said in a recent telephone interview from his Manhattan apartment. “When I went to get my master’s at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, I got into the fire of (acting) and out of the protection I felt in college, but when I look back, I think the instructors at Southwest were just as good as those I’ve met anywhere, and I’m even talking New York. I don’t think we realized just how good we had it,” Whitlock said.

Full of stories from the industry, Whitlock remains the kind, fun-loving and unassuming man who sang and danced in the SMSU student band Clutch and the Shifters, where he was nicknamed “Sugar Bear” by founder Joe Keyes, another SMSU alum who has gone on to professional television work. Today, Whitlock gets a fair number of autograph requests and grateful compliments from viewers moved by his work.

During early readings of the script for Martin Scorsese’s film “The Color of Money,” Whitlock was invited to contribute his talent. “I walked in, and Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese and Tom Cruise were sitting in Paul’s living room with a few other members of the Actor’s Studio,” to which Whitlock belongs. “You get used to rubbing elbows with well-known professionals in the industry,” Whitlock said. “I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to work with such talented people.” Scorsese remembered him from the reading and gave him a part in “Goodfellas,” where he played a doctor. Whitlock performed in “A Small Melodramatic Story” by playwright Stephen Belber with the New York-based Labyrinth theater founded by Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is a friend.

Whitlock appears in the 2006 film “Kettle of Fish” with Matthew Modine and Gina Gershon, recently returned from England where he filmed a role in the upcoming Stephen King film “1408,” with John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Isiah was cast in a pivotal role in the well-received and highly acclaimed independent film “Pieces of April,” starring Katie Holmes. Director Peter Hedges, who wrote the movie, and authored the novel “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” as well as its screenplay, “told me to look as if I’d just gotten up that morning to prepare Thanksgiving dinner, so I just rolled out of bed and went over without combing my hair,” Whitlock recalls.

The actor played a serial killer on “Law and Order,” and performed as Agent Flood in Spike Lee’s “25th Hour,” a role he reprised in Lee’s “She Hate Me.” He also had character parts in Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You” and the film “Eddie” with Whoopi Goldberg. Fans of “The Wire” can see Whitlock play the morally bankrupt Senator Clay Davis with an oily panache. He chuckles when told he is good at looking mean. “You’re the third person who told me that today,” he says, describing the surprise of a theater marketing manager at meeting him to find he was not an evil recluse. ‘I took psychology classes at SMSU,” he said. ‘If you believe as the character that what you are doing is right, you can play the hell out of it. People say I’m nasty as Agent Flood when I bust Ed Norton in “25th Hour,” but I say ‘hey, he was selling drugs,” and when I was promoted from DEA agent to an SEC officer in “She Hate Me,” I remind people that I was going after a guy who was suspected of insider trading. What about Enron?’

Characteristically humble, Whitlock downplays his success in an industry where few actors make it, even those with superb talent. “It’s all relative,” Whitlock says of his acting career. “It’s all the things you hear—cut throat and more. “But there is something kind of charming about acting, and something I love. I think if you get a certain amount of experience, you get to know people in the industry and they get to know you. You understand how people work and react; they know how you work, and it becomes a little easier. You can still get burned and you can still have bad days. You learn how to navigate it,” he said.

Raised in South Bend as the fifth child in a family of 11 children, Whitlock came to SMSU as a football recruit, but a series of injuries convinced him that a future in professional athletics was not for him. “As a kid all I ever wanted to be was a baseball player and I can’t play for shit,” said the actor, who tends to pepper his conversation with colorful language, most typically “What the hell.”

He tried working in the steel mill where his father worked one summer, but “it was hot and smelly and dangerous and the fumes nauseated me. Flames shot out of the equipment and one day my pants caught on fire and I was jumping around like the Scarecrow in the “Wizard of Oz,” he said.

“I knew I didn’t want that, and even though I’d been bugging my father about getting me the job so I could earn some summer money, he agreed with me. He said he couldn’t understand why I wanted to work there in the first place, and that I should do something else,” Whitlock said.

While Whitlock had never considered acting or any artistic career as a youth—“We just tried to stay out of trouble, because we knew our folks couldn’t bail us out,”

Whitlock notes—he realized early as a Mustangs defensive lineman that “it didn’t have to be all about football. I only weighed 180 pounds, which is not that small, but small enough,” Whitlock explained. “I was getting concussions and injuries, and I thought, I’m getting really banged up and I can never really see myself playing professionally, so what’s the point?”

But as his acting career illustrates, Whitlock, the only member of his family to attend college, is no quitter. “I never wanted to quit,” he said. “It wasn’t so much wanting to leave the team as coming to the realization that I was in college and could take advantage of the knowledge available.”

Whitlock describes his move towards theater as a major change in his life, and it wasn’t easy. “I had a difficult time making the shift and being able to segue out of athletics without getting anyone upset and having people think I wanted to leave because I couldn’t take it. But then I went to the theater to watch the auditions for Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and I ended up getting a part,” he said.

Then, Mustangs trainer R.A. Colvin, supported Whitlock’s decision. “Even after I quit the team and started acting, R.A. was someone I could talk to about anything that came up while a student at Southwest State. We stayed in touch over the years and he was always a big supporter and big fan.”

His teammates also supported him. Lionel Bolden of Marshall, also an SMSU alum and now an active Booster Club member and successful Minnesota business owner, helped recruit Whitlock to campus. The two men attended the same South Bend High School, where both played football.

“I talked to Isiah about coming to Marshall,” Bolden said. ‘I wanted good people on the team, and on the football field he was a tough guy. People respected Isiah’s choice to be in the theater and were proud of him. I saw several of his plays at Southwest, and he was so creative and talented: I’d say to everyone “Look at this guy. That’s the kind of talent we have in South Bend.”

Retired theater professor Bill Hezlep has stayed in touch with his former student and followed Whitlock’s career closely. “It took a lot of courage on Isiah’s part to audition,” Hezlep said. ‘He was first cast in “The Crucible” and became one of our mainstays; from then on Isiah was in almost every production.’

Hezlep continues to find Whitlock’s live stage appearances phenomenal. “Isiah has a strong presence in films, but it’s nowhere near the incredible intensity that you see when you watch him in live theater. He’s dynamic. He can be doing nothing, and you’ll be watching him. Isiah is very charismatic on stage,” Hezlep said.

Theater critics in New York agree. Whitlock has received numerous positive reviews of his work in all media, but was particularly happy with an article on his starring role in “Four,” a complex and controversial play about a married university professor who becomes involved with a teen boy on the Internet, and meets the youth for a date. Playwright Christopher Shinn, for whom Whitlock created the role, commented in a “New York Times” article that Whitlock was able to look below the surface of the character’s actions and see the pain beneath. “As a writer, you can indicate that in the text, but something that profound can only happen through the performance,” Shinn said.

Whitlock’s stage presence has not been restricted to theater. In Clutch and the Shifters, he danced and sang in a silver lame jumpsuit of his own design and construction.

“I was a terrible singer,” he says, “but yeah, well, I can dance. I wanted a gold lame suit, but we could only find silver fabric, and I sewed it myself,” he said. “Sure I know how to sew. As a theater student I had to work in set design or costuming as part of the major, but I knew where the girls were. I went into the costume shop,” he said.

The actor keeps a photograph of himself with The Clutch band members in the Manhattan home he shares with actress and writer Wilma Mondi, his partner of 15 years, who has visited Southwest with him and helped him prepare the commencement address he gave in 2000. “I’m looking at the photo now,” he said during the interview. “It reminds me of that time and how much I benefited from being at Southwest. Of course I looked better than I sang,”

he quips, but when the band went out on tour, Whitlock stayed in school. “We were pretty popular at Southwest, but when the Shifters decided to go on tour, they had to go without Sugar Bear,” he said.

Whitlock had his eye on graduation. “Graduating from Southwest was a big step for me,” Whitlock explained. “I’d promised my dad that I’d stick it out and finish. My dad came to my graduation, which was one of the highlights of my life. I remember him getting out of the car, looking around at all the cornfields, and saying "how did you get way the hell up here?"

Yet Whitlock says that when it came time to leave Southwest, “I didn’t want to go. I was on my way to San Francisco for graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater. Going to that big city; you talk about a culture shock. I’m from South Bend, and we were in a different world then. I was just horrified. I didn’t think I was going to make it from day to day. But I found my way. I was in ACT with some of the most amazing actors in the business, and I just dealt with the tension and learned to survive it all,” he said.

When ACT members decided to found a theater company in New York City, Whitlock went to Manhattan, where, in an attempt to save money, he slept in the theater.

“Yeah, I guess I was homeless in New York,” he said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have any money, but rents were high and I figured that I was paying $40 a month for the theater space and I had a key, so why not just sleep there? I remember one night the technical crew was hanging lights for a production and I had to spend most of the night in an all-night diner until they finished about 4:30 a.m. I kept going back and checking until they finished, and then just fell asleep on the floor.”

Times have changed for the actor. His work is known and recognized by enough people in the industry that he has no trouble finding roles, and he works on it constantly, meeting with producers and directors and acting on stage.

But he keeps in touch with his roots, visiting his numerous siblings and their children regularly and contributing to his alma mater, where he was honored with the Alumni Achievement award in 2004 and recently spent a week on campus teaching master classes, meeting with high school and college students, and leading the SMSU theatre department Readers Theatre production of August Wilson’s “Fences”.

SMSU senior Jacob Swanson appreciates Whitlock’s attention to Southwest. “As an African American working his way into the field of theater, it’s inspiring to have a role model like Isiah, who has made it in the industry, not only as an SMSU grad, but as a fellow actor of color,” Swanson said.

For his part, Whitlock says he can’t do enough to demonstrate his appreciation for the school.

“I wish I could do more,” he said. “Southwest was a wonderful place for me; it was a safe environment. Yeah, there wasn’t much to do on the weekends, but we had fun. I was there to learn, and I did.”