‘Dope Thief’ Star Brian Tyree Henry on Connecting With Ray

B
rian Tyree Henry is tall. Around six feet two, with a commanding presence that, rather than impose, invites — a warmth that seems proportional to his stature. It’s how he manages to maintain a comfortable, low-key profile inside the restaurant at New York’s Four Seasons hotel, where, he tells me, he’s a regular. The Emmy-nominated actor, famous for his performance as the rapper Paper Boi in the acclaimed series Atlanta, has an easy rapport with the staff, who seem relieved that the A-lister in their midst treats them like peers.

He’s in town promoting his Apple TV+ series, Dope Thief, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Peter Craig. (The finale airs April 25.) Henry stars as Ray Driscoll, a down-on-his-luck ex-con who, along with his buddy and former cellmate Manny Carvalho (played by Wagner Moura), poses as a DEA agent to rob low-level drug dealers in Philadelphia. Based on the novel by Dennis Tafoya, the series follows Ray as he becomes increasingly enmeshed in a complex web of crime and cover-ups. 

Henry wears a long black shirt and an assortment of gold chains, including one with a pendant in the shape of Africa, and speaks in a deep, rhythmic baritone that fills the air like burning incense. Over a plate of french fries, he describes the night his manager gave him the script for Dope Thief. Henry was made up in full prosthetics to play his future self for the FX series Class of ’09, where he portrayed an FBI agent split between the past, present, and future as a rogue AI took over the reins of law enforcement. Despite being adamant about not wanting to do another TV series, he found himself hooked after reading the Dope Thief pilot. “I started reading it, and the character Ray was my focus,” he says. “And I was like, ‘The only way I’ll do this is if there’s another episode.’” 

Henry could immediately see himself as the main character, but he also appreciated the sense of camaraderie between Ray and his partner in crime, Manny. Citing the lack of shows depicting male friendships, Henry saw an opportunity to explore fresh ideas with the part. “I loved Ray immediately, and I was also really attracted to the relationship between Ray and Manny,” he says. “In a way, I was like, ‘Oh, Dope Thief is a love story, technically, between these two guys.’” 

Still, for Henry, who has spent much of this year in London working on a film directed by Sam Esmail, acting in another series was a tall order. Class of ’09 began filming around the same time that he was wrapping the final season of Atlanta, which he starred in for four seasons. “I had been so immersed in television that I was like, ‘I need a break.’ And I love TV,” he says. “But it takes a lot to grow with that character and develop that character for however many episodes.”

Henry is still probably most recognizable as Paper Boi, a.k.a. Alfred, a role he infused with an almost impossible depth of humanity and charm. “Every character that I’ve had the privilege of playing is always a product of their environment,” he says. “They are men who are born and raised in a city, and they never leave the city. I’m always like, ‘What is that about?’ Because I’ll run the fuck away. My mother tells this story, she’s like, ‘The minute you learned to walk, your ass ran. The minute we let your hand go, you just ran.’”

Back to the Beginning

Brian Tyree Henry was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and lived in Atlanta after enrolling at Morehouse University. He studied theater after switching majors from business. He received his master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York City, where he spent more than a decade acting in theater productions. Whereas his instincts as a kid found him racing far from home, Henry says his career has had a way of bringing him right back to pivotal locations in his life. “I think that this is the closest way for me to return home, by doing what I’m doing, because it always makes me have to confront those places,” he says. 

Ditto for one of his most famous roles. 

“Atlanta is the city that made me. I went there for my formative years of 18 to 21,” he says. “I believe most of my journey in this acting industry has been about going home and showing people how you can go home, or how to make a home.” 

More than just rearranging his relationship to home, Henry says his roles thus far have pushed him to face his past. Dope Thief’s Ray, for instance, grapples with a complicated relationship with his father, who was absent for much of his life. The script, Henry says, mirrored his own story. “I’ve never really talked about my father at all, just because he wasn’t present in my life. And when I say he wasn’t present, I knew where he was, I knew where he lived, but we were very estranged,” he explains. “So, in order to protect myself, I just never talked about him, because in order to talk about him, I’d have to talk about all different parts of my life that I wasn’t ready to share.” He says with Dope Thief, he was able to “battle those demons.” 

Henry’s mother died in a car accident shortly after he finished filming Season One of Atlanta. While he and his mom were close, the loss highlighted his mother’s often tumultuous relationship with his father. “Even though I believe they loved each other, it was violent. It was an abrasive relationship,” Henry explains. “It just wasn’t covered in love.” So, in the years after his mother’s death, Henry says, he and his father had to figure out a way to come together. “That was the thing I challenged him with. I was like, ‘Well, how do you want to be in my life?’”

Dope Thief was one of the many projects impacted by the writers’ strike of 2023. Production on the series began in January and went on pause for nearly five months as the strike halted work in May of that year. “Something in my heart, I can’t even explain what it was, said, ‘Stay in Philly. Just stay in Philly,’” Henry says. “One, you don’t know when this strike is going to lift. I had such an amazingly tight rapport with my crew and cast, and I wanted to be there and stay rooted in the city, because that’s Ray.”

“I feel like every character that I pick is a different way to show me how to love me, too.”

He’d initially planned to celebrate Thanksgiving in Philadelphia when he got a call from his half sister. “My phone is usually on ‘do not disturb’ — I don’t like notifications in my house — but she got through, and she was just like, ‘Your dad is gone,’” Henry recalls, with a visible sense of calm running across his face. “I remember standing there, man, and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s over.’ So, all the pain and all the stories of how disconnected we were, how abusive he was, how angry this man was, it is all over. But I was like, I also have to be the one to take care of it. I’m his only kid that he’s taken care of, and I’ve always been ready to be the one to bury this man. And I hadn’t been home in over a decade.”

He traveled back to North Carolina with his two sisters (who have different fathers but were raised in the same house) to the place where he grew up. “This house, when I was a kid, seemed so big, but it was small. It was a small house, and he didn’t change anything.” While handling his father’s affairs, Henry made a discovery that shifted what he thought he understood about his father and the relationship they’d had. “When I walked into his house, it was a shrine to me,” he says. “He had pictures from every major milestone in my life. He had a photo of me on the red carpet at the Oscars. He had a photo of me at the Emmys. He even had a photograph of my Happy Meal toy when I did Eternals. But none of this I would’ve known, because something in him could never let me know that he saw it or that he was proud or that he cared.”

Immediately after he buried his dad, Henry returned to Philly, where production had resumed. They were filming Episode Six of Dope Thief, which is all about Ray and his father, played by Ving Rhames. “What I will say is that that entire crew from top to bottom took care of me. They knew exactly between takes to check on me,” Henry says.

Speaking to The New York Times, Moura noted Henry’s emotional depth, even in a profession full of people acutely attuned to their higher selves. “He’s a very spiritual person,” Moura said. “He’s very connected to his inner self. It does seem very intense.” 

While Ray’s character spends much of Dope Thief quietly seething at his father, his relationship with the adoptive mother in his life, Theresa, played by Kate Mulgrew, propels the series forward. At first glance, the casting feels slightly jarring. Here is this white woman we’re made to believe is the maternal figure to this very large Black man. “They were like, ‘We think she should be white.’ And I was like, ‘But why?’ Peter then broke down the connection between her and my dad and that love story, but also how her taking over raising me was a testimony to her love for my father, and then ultimately her love for me. And I was like, ‘You know what? All right.’” 

What Henry taps into for the role — an affecting, if longing, sense of compassion and devotion — bears yet another connection to his own life. When he was 11, his mother sent him to live with his father for several years. “I adopted moms along the way,” he says. “I realized at a very young age that my parents were adults trying to figure shit out, too. I never got a chance to deify my parents. I feel like that’s exactly reflective of what Ray’s journey was.” 

Henry sees that element of his life as one of the major themes of his early career. “I often wondered, ‘Did my parents have any story about my first steps? Does anybody remember when I did this?’ I didn’t have any of that. So, I was constantly roaming around trying to figure out what my position in life was,” he says. “For a long time, I was chasing this validation instead of standing on my own shit, being like, ‘What are you talking about, man? You were there. You did it.’ When these characters find me, they find me at the right time, when I’m ready to confront different levels of it.” 

He remembers when he got the role for Alfred in Atlanta, he’d already been doing theater in New York for years and knew he was ready to do television, but doubted himself. “I was like, ‘Well, I don’t think I’m a leading man to some people. I don’t think that I’m a lover to some people,’” he recalls. “Sure enough, when I let go of all that shit, Alfred came along. I had to be OK with where I was and how I presented. I think the universe was like, ‘It’s time. Go out there.’” 

Blood Brothers

As if the universe could sense the heaviness of our conversation, some levity. The restaurant is playing “The Whistle Song,” by Chicago House pioneer Frankie Knuckles. The song’s title has eluded Henry for some time, and he relishes the opportunity to finally Shazam the tune. I confess that I’d briefly believed Henry was British on account of his role in Bullet Train, where he played a convincingly British assassin named Lemon whose “twin” brother, Tangerine, was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He lets out a big laugh, explaining how director David Leitch allowed for experimentation with the role. “I’m really grateful I fought to keep him British. But not only that, they’re brothers. I was like, ‘I really believe they believe they’re brothers,’” he says. “And the same feeling that I had with Wagner, I had with Aaron, that we never left each other’s side. And we really believed we were brothers.”

So much so, apparently, that Leitch added a flashback scene of the two characters as kids. “I was like, ‘How do you think we became assassins? We’ve been in the foster system together for so long, and then maybe somebody saw something in us and then made us assassins.’ He was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

That sort of collaborative process seems to follow Henry wherever he goes. He says he’s just getting comfortable in the role of executive producer, a credit he’s got on Dope Thief. “The way that I come at EP is being a bridge, because when we’re in West Philly at three in the morning in these neighborhoods, these producers aren’t going to go talk to the neighbors. So, I was like, ‘But I will,’” he says. “I’m always in the hair and makeup trailer. I’m always in the costume trailer. Those are my peeps. But I didn’t realize that that’s not common. I’m still learning.” 

“For a long time, I was chasing validation instead of standing on my own shit.”

He says he’s been approached more recently about directing. “That’s something I want to do, and a whole other level of fear that I don’t know,” he says. “But I got to try.”

Toward the end of our lunch, Henry mentions how one of his favorite playwrights is Tony Kushner. He remembers reading Angels in America, Kushner’s renowned story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and it leaving an immediate impression. “One of the characters in Angels in America that I’ve always wanted to play, that I’ve always thought was brilliant, was Prior, the main lead,” he explains. “This homosexual man who contracts HIV and starts seeing the angels. And he’s always white, all the time. There’s no reason for him to be, but he always is.”

The main Black character in the play is Belize, and when Henry was asked during the pandemic to do a virtual reading of Angels in America, he was asked to play the role. “I challenged the director, and I was like, ‘I want to play Prior. I just think that I know that I can do it, I promise you, if you just give me the opportunity.’ And they said yes.”

After a rousing rendition of the play’s famous Bethesda monologue (“We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come”), Kushner himself sent Henry a letter. “He couldn’t believe he had never seen a Black Prior,” Henry recalls. “I printed that letter out, and I framed it. I feel like every character that I pick is a different way to show me how to love me, too, how to love all those parts of me, because all those parts are part of me.”