Many actors were recycled from recognizable series such as The Corner (Clarke Peters, Maria Broom, and Delaney Williams), Oz (J. D. Williams, Seth Gilliam, and Lance Reddick), and Homicide (Peter Gerety, Robert Chew, and Jim True-Frost). Fogel also successfully pushed for two relatively unknown British actors, Dominic West and Idris Elba, to land prominent roles in The Wire.
