We would all like to leave a legacy. However, the idiosyncractic pronunciation of an expletive probably wasn't the legacy Isiah Whitlock Jr had in mind when he first said "Sheeeeeeeee-it" on screen in his sonorous voice more than a decade ago.
He first put his spin on the s-word word in Spike Lee movies, but he's perhaps better known for his trademark pronunciation from his days playing corrupt senator Clay Davis in The Wire. While it's been seven years since the last episode of the gritty Baltimore crime drama screened, Whitlock still gets asked to say the word 365-days a year.
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"I go through my daily life with everybody stopping me on the street wanting me to say 'Sheeeeeeeee-it'. I'm in Venice trying to get a gondola or at the Cipriani and some people will ask me to say it. Wherever I go, it's like: 'You're the guy.'" While Idris Elba – The Wire's Stringer Bell – has gone on to play Nelson Mandela and been touted as the next James Bond, Whitlock's reward for starring in one of the best television shows of all time is a little more quirky.
It's "bizarre", he admits. But he's turning bizarre into a bazaar after launching a talking bobblehead that says – you guessed it – "Sheeeeeeeee-it", complete with his trademarked nine e's. "Now I can tell people to just go home and press the button on the bobblehead and let him say it." And if the twitter rumors are true, President Obama, an avowed fan of The Wire, can press the button on his new bobblehead whenever the sheeeeeeeee-it hits the fan.
Besides bobbleheads, there is Whitlock's other pastime – wine. Whitlock has been interested in wine since he first arrived in New York City and got a job at Morrell wine store. It started a lifelong love affair with wine that has, at times, become a little obsessive. It has even led to an eviction. He started making wine in his New York apartment, so he must have had a bigger apartment than most in the city? "No, I didn't and I got kicked out so I'm always thinking that's why my landlord asked me to leave – because it really smelled out the place, you know? I had carboys all over my apartment and things bubbling.
"People would come round and say: 'What are these huge bottles all doing in your apartment?' and I would say: 'I'm making Cabernet over here and Sauvignon Blanc over there and this is a bottle of Chardonnay', and they would ask: 'Why is it orange?' and I would say: 'I don't know, I haven't quite figured that out yet but it tastes good!'"
He has since graduated from carboys in his apartment to a winemaking facility in New Jersey to produce wine – he's also had to find a new apartment, which isn't as nice as his last place but, he says, only half-jokingly, that he was out of his mind when he set up a makeshift winery in his apartment.
Unfortunately, you can't buy his wine, but he's gone to the trouble of giving it a brand name and creating a label. The afro-sporting critter on the Funky Penquin (sic) label marries Saturday Night Fever and Happy Feet. The unusual name pays homage to an eponymous dance they did during his time with the band Clutch and the Shifters in the early 1970s, who were inducted into the Mid-America Music Hall of Fame. It's not as glamorous as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though, is it, Isiah?
"I just tell people I'm in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, when they press me on it, I admit it's the Mid-America Hall of Fame but Bob Dylan is there too so it's legit. I don't think he's as delighted about sharing it with me as I am with him."
Whitlock probably doesn't know it but Dylan also shares his love of wine. Dylan once endorsed an Italian red wine produced by the Marche region's Fattoria Le Terrazze, which was named after his 1974 album Planet Waves (see our Celebrity Wine page). Italian wine also happens to be Whitlock's thing, and it makes up a large part of his wine collection, which is rapidly diminishing – not due to his drinking prowess, however.
"You can only drink so much, so I have scaled down a bit; I sold a bit and made a nice little profit – not that that was my intention." It appears that Whitlock needs some wine-geek friends in his life to share his fine wines, as he has been known to open a magnum of Château Margaux and had to polish most of it off himself because – "no insult to my friends" – they're just not into wine.
"At the end of the night I had half the bottle left and I thought there's no way I'm going to let this go to waste. If I've got to stay up til 5 in the morning drinking this, that's what I'm going to do." That was one expensive hangover.
Winemaking is also an expensive hobby – "like playing golf". However, the bobblehead project has raised more than $60,000 to date, from more than 1250 backers, which should help cover the cost of his Napa Valley grapes for the 2015 vintage.
You can also make wine with Whitlock. He has been producing reds for the last four years, dabbling in Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, sourcing fruit from illustrious names including Beckstoffer and Stagecoach. For $10,000, one backer and three friends get to stomp Whitlock's 2015 harvest with him "like Lucille Ball", be his dinner guests and, of course, there's a bobblehead thrown in. Whitlock might not be doing any stomping himself, though.
"I was gonna do it that way once, but the guy who ran the winemaking facility said the novelty of it soon wears off when people's feet start to bleed."
