Mykelti Williamson, the actor who improvised Bubba’s shrimp and never ate at Bubba Gump

Mykelti Williamson

Photo: Peabody Awards / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 4, 1957 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	Forrest Gump, Heat, Lucky Number Slevin

The script gave Bubba four or five ways to cook a shrimp. Mykelti Williamson arrived on the set of Forrest Gump with about forty in his head, reeled off fifteen in his first scene, and the crew laughed so hard that Robert Zemeckis told him to keep going and stitch the shrimp through the whole film. That litany became one of the most quoted speeches in a Best Picture winner and, later, the name over the door of a restaurant chain. Williamson has never eaten in one. Nobody, he says, ever properly invited him to share in something he helped create, because “what I brought to the screen was not on the page. It wasn’t even close.”

That gap between authorship and ownership runs through his whole career. He is the rare character actor whose most famous part is also the one that hides him best: the slow Alabama drawl, the shrimp-boat dream, the friend who dies in Vietnam halfway through the film. Audiences remember Bubba. Fewer of them clock that the same man played Don King for Michael Mann, Nicolas Cage‘s diabetic cellmate in Con Air, a detective carrying a buried trauma in Boomtown, and the war-wounded brother who tries to trumpet open the gates of heaven at the end of Fences.

St. Louis, Missouri, is where the record starts. Williamson was born there as Michael T. Williamson on March 4, 1957, and moved with his family to Los Angeles at nine. He danced as an alternate with The Lockers on Soul Train, studied television and film at Los Angeles City College and later earned a cinematography certificate in San Jose, a technical grounding that later fed his work as a director. As a teenager he sang lead in PBS’s The Righteous Apples, a series about a Boston high-school band.

The 1980s were a long apprenticeship in guest spots: Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, China Beach, an early film part in Streets of Fire. On Midnight Caller he worked with Rita Wilson and met her husband, Tom Hanks. By the time Forrest Gump was casting, Williamson was working as an acting coach, and two of his students auditioned for Bubba without landing it. Dave Chappelle has said he turned the role down. Williamson had to fight to get his own tape seen; once Zemeckis watched it, he was paired with Hanks for a reading. Hanks, he recalled on the Still Here Hollywood podcast in 2025, kept kicking him under the table because he liked what he was hearing. “I got the job, and thank God I was persistent.”

Forrest Gump won six Oscars, and the decade that followed shows a working actor using the visibility rather than repeating the trick. He was the social worker Dwight Mercer in Free Willy and its sequel, Sergeant Drucker in Michael Mann’s Heat, Troy in Waiting to Exhale, and the Negro league catcher Josh Gibson in HBO’s Soul of the Game, a performance that drew warm reviews. He took Juror 10 in William Friedkin‘s television remake of 12 Angry Men, a colonel in David O. Russell’s Three Kings, and in 2001 returned to Mann for Ali, playing the promoter Don King opposite Will Smith.

The strongest argument for Williamson is the work fewest people saw. Boomtown, Graham Yost’s NBC police drama, told each Los Angeles crime from several points of view, and Williamson’s Detective Bobby “Fearless” Smith was its most exposed character. In one episode Fearless confronts the sexual abuse he suffered as a child; Yost later called it one of the best hours the show made, and also recalled that NBC, while the producers fought for a second season, discouraged them from making more like it. The network retooled the series for ratings, the ratings did not come, and it went off the air in December 2003. Critics loved it; the public never found it. That pattern recurs: television kept handing him the layered parts, while film kept him in the frame of the man people already thought they knew.

He spent seven episodes of CSI: NY as Chief Brigham Sinclair, back on screen with his Forrest Gump co-star Gary Sinise; ran CTU New York as Brian Hastings in the eighth season of 24; and played Ellstin Limehouse, the soft-spoken power broker of Harlan County, across fifteen episodes of Justified. The most lasting role of that stretch came from the stage. He played Gabriel, Troy Maxson’s brother, in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Fences opposite Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, then reprised it in Washington’s 2016 film, whose cast was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award. Behind the camera he has directed episodes of Chicago Med, FBI and Sweet Magnolias.

After a guest turn in Fallout, a part in the wrestling drama Unstoppable and Jon Avnet’s The Last Rodeo opposite Neal McDonough, 2026 brought three projects in six months. In Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, released by Orion on May 15, he plays Chuck Hall, the former defense attorney of the father two sisters set out to punish; the film earned strong reviews and a soft box office. In Sheldon Candis’s boxing drama They Fight, which premiered at Tribeca in June and reached Hulu on July 17, he is Coach Mac alongside André Holland and Wendell Pierce. And in The Drop: A Snowfall Saga, Malcolm Spellman’s spin-off of Snowfall for FX, he plays James “Big Daddy” Kinsey, a laundromat owner and the grandfather of the Kinsey brothers. Its eight episodes ran weekly on FX and Hulu from September 8, and on Disney+ outside the United States.

His private life has occasionally made headlines of its own. He was married to the Miami Vice actress Olivia Brown in the 1980s and later to Cheryl Chisholm, with whom he had his first child. In 1998 he was charged after stabbing his former wife’s boyfriend; a judge cut the count to attempted manslaughter, and a jury acquitted him that September. He has been with Sondra Spriggs since 1997, when they married during the shoot of TNT’s Buffalo Soldiers, and they have two daughters.

FX has not yet said whether The Drop will return for a second season, and that decision will shape the next stretch of his career more than any anniversary of Forrest Gump. At sixty-nine, Williamson has crossed from the friend in the platoon to the family patriarch, the coach and the lawyer who carries a client’s past. The shrimp list still follows him into every interview. The invitation to the restaurant still has not arrived.

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