Your second year at Yale School of Drama, says Brian Tyree Henry, is the one that “makes or breaks you”. As well as rigorous Shakespeare studies – including staging the Bard’s works on a shoestring – Henry was also cast as a lead in a Yale Repertory Theatre production of Dance of the Holy Ghosts: A Play on Memory by the African-American playwright Marcus Gardley, appearing alongside professional actors. It was a rare opportunity for a student, and one that he relished. But Henry – who had previously honed his talents at Atlanta’s majority-Black Morehouse College – didn’t feel as though his efforts were truly recognised while at the Ivy League institution.
“It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, 17 years later, that one of my classmates was like, I’m filming something and going to school at the same time, and I couldn't help thinking about you,” says Henry. His friend acknowledged just how much work he must have put in at the time. “I was like, you have no idea how badly I needed to hear that. I didn’t think that anybody cared. It was really nice to get that validation and affirmation that what I did was being seen.” It might seem unusual that Henry – the star of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, who has enjoyed Emmy and Oscar nods – is thinking back to his college days, but he has had reason to of late. His latest project is an Apple TV+ series, Dope Thief, a zippy crime caper that slowly unfurls into a high-stakes drama. The feeling of not being seen, he says, “trickles into my character, Ray. He has this moniker of being the inconvenient child. And I had been feeling like that for most of my life. That’s why acting was so important to me. In the places and spaces where I’m not recognised or encouraged or even treated like I matter … when I act, I feel safe and protected.”
Although he is in a reflective mood, Henry – who celebrates his 43rd birthday later this month – clearly has much to celebrate on the career front. Since coming up as reluctant rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles in the anarchic, boundary-bending TV comedy Atlanta, he’s rarely been off both the big and small screen (fans of the show will be happy to know that he retains what he describes as a “close-knit” relationship with Glover and the rest of the crew). Praised by many as a chameleon, Henry has starred in action blockbusters (Bullet Train with Brad Pitt), dark thrillers (Steve McQueen’s Widows), emotive dramas (Causeway with Jennifer Lawrence, which led to that best actor Oscar nomination), and even popped up in the MCU as Phastos in Eternals.
When we meet at a London hotel he is partway through shooting a new film, Panic Carefully, written by Mr Robot creator Sam Esmail, and starring Eddie Redmayne and Julia Roberts (“a legend, and the love of my life,” says Henry). He looks every inch the booked-and-busy star, wearing enough jewellery to send an airport metal detector into meltdown, and a buttery-looking leather jacket subtly stamped with the logo of Spanish luxury brand Loewe. But despite his successes, Henry remains grounded, self-aware and – although he’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny, especially when talking about his favourite British shop, Waitrose (an “essential” part of any trip to London) – clearly a deep thinker, a hint of a frown stretching across his face when he concentrates.
Casting his mind back to Yale again, he explains that Dope Thief – which is also his first exec producer credit – is “very Shakespearean, and [like a] Greek tragedy”. Indeed, there are downfall-causing flaws, bucket loads of hubris, and more than a little irony to the Philadelphia-set series. It centres on Ray and his bestie Manny (Wagner Moura, light years away from his role as cartel king Pablo Escobar in Narcos), who have the (initially brilliant) idea of posing as cops to rob drug gangs of their wares. It goes surprisingly well – until the real cops get involved, of course. It’s a heavier affair than it seems at first glance, and comes with some proper prestige attached: Ridley Scott is also an executive producer, and directed the opening episode. For Henry, the role is another example of “reaching that person at the back of the room that doesn’t feel seen ... I’m reaching that version of me that doesn’t feel seen.”
He has spoken at length in previous interviews about his tough childhood in North Carolina and Washington DC. By the time he was born, his four older sisters were already adults, and his parents split up when he was young; he told Variety in 2023 that there was “a lot of strife, a lot of poverty, a lot of pain under that roof”. Acting, he says, has allowed him to reflect back to himself “the different kinds of men I want to be, or that I could be”. Having guardianship of different characters allows him to care for them, and to be able to tell them that “hey, somebody does see you, somebody does care about you. I will make sure that you’re loved. I will make sure that you’re protected. It’s all the things that I think I wanted in my upbringing that I didn’t get.”
He is clearly very proud of Dope Thief, and says it is one of the first projects he’s done “that has gotten so close to what I’ve endured”. As well as his risky criminal scheming, Ray struggles with fractured family relationships – in particular with his father, who is in prison – and the trauma of losing his first love, all while slipping further and further into alcoholism. In one scene that’s equal parts hilarious and gut-wrenching, his adoptive mother (played beautifully by Orange Is The New Black’s Kate Mulgrew) tells him that he has “few friends and no love” in his life; Ray asks whether this is supposed to be an intervention or an invitation to kill himself. “You see him going to AA meetings, you see him kind of trying to talk things out, but for the most part, he hasn’t really figured out how to truly care for himself,” says Henry. “I was like, I have done so much work on myself, that I think I’m able to really guide Ray in a [way] that feels safe.”
The series also brought him face-to-face with the fresh grief he was enduring at the time. Dope Thief was, like many shows shot over the past few years, delayed due to the Hollywood writers’ strikes (Henry hired a bouncy castle for the cast and crew to let their emotions out before production shut down). During the break in filming, he lost his father. And, by chance, the first day back on set after seven months saw him shooting some particularly heavy scenes with Ving Rhames, who plays Ray’s father, Bart. “Grief is inevitable. Loss is inevitable,” says Henry, matter-of-factly. “The difference is that when you are dealing with grief and loss in a medium such as television and film, you’re reenacting a lot of those things – there’s often nowhere to hide.”
He sees a kind of kismet in the fact that he has been confronted with parental grief yet again. His mother died suddenly, just after he finished filming the first season of Atlanta; in the second series of the show, the episode “Woods” sees Paper Boi struggling on the anniversary of his own mother’s death. Even before Henry’s father died, he had wanted to “confront the father/son dynamic”. Initially, it felt too close to home, “and then I remember sitting with Peter [Craig, Dope Thief’s creator, who also wrote Top Gun: Maverick], and we couldn’t be two more different people. We started talking about our relationships with our dads. And I was just like, wow, so I’m not alone…”
Coming back to filming after his father’s death was difficult in ways one might not necessarily expect. “My father was an angry man. I mean, he was a good man, but he was an angry man, very misunderstood. We were estranged for almost a decade,” says Henry. “I’d done the work to create boundaries and to try to find forgiveness and so on, but that pain and that trauma had been my identity for so long. So when I got the call and he was gone, I was like, oh, shit, well: who am I now?”
Despite all that was going on in the background, Henry clearly brought his A-game to Dope Thief. And, if it sounds like it might be overly heavy, there are also moments that you imagine were a riot to film – in particular, a farcical opening sequence where Ray and Manny realise that the drug dealer they’re about to pounce on is in fact a little kid. The chemistry between Henry and Moura is key; the actors shared what Henry calls “this incredible spiritual connection … at our first meeting it felt like we had known each other forever.” It is, he says, “so easy to see a show like this with a Black and a Latino man that is dealing with violence and drugs, and you just already want to compare it to something else. I really wanted to make sure that people understood how much Ray and Manny care about each other. I was like, actually, it’s a love story. You’re watching the relationship between two people who love each other, who are terribly co-dependent, trying to find a way to care for and protect one another.” He has described their relationship as the “gooey centre” of the series.
It’s clear that Henry really appreciated his old classmate getting in touch. That, coupled with all the work he did on Dope Thief, seems to have brought him to a peaceful place of late, where he is giving much of himself to his work but also getting plenty in return. “Ray was somebody I needed and who needed me, and he came along exactly when I was ready to lay those burdens down and lean into it,” he says. “I think that being able to do this show was some of the best healing I’ve ever had.” The universe, he says with a laugh, can be “incredibly petty”, but – ultimately – “I don’t think it ever gives me more than I can handle.”
‘Dope Thief’ is on Apple TV+ from 14 March
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