🎧 Brian Tyree Henry Needed a Rest. Then He Read 'Dope Thief'
The Oscar nominee and 'Atlanta' alum on finding his own way into the dark material: 'Yeah, I can relate to this'
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Brian Tyree Henry wasn’t ready for another TV show, and he really wasn’t ready for another TV show in which he had to hold a gun or deal with grief. Henry, who was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and attended the Yale School of Drama after graduating from Morehouse College in 2004, broke out in 2016 on Atlanta in an Emmy-nominated role, earned an Oscar nomination for the Jennifer Lawrence drama Causeway and starred on the action-heavy series Class of ’09. In just a few years, he had established himself as a compelling screen presence who could balance lightness with some real soul-shaking drama. But it took a toll.
“Your body doesn’t know it’s fake, you know what I mean?” Henry, 43, tells me on today’s special weekend edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “ You’re drumming up all these emotions and you’re going through all these things, but your body doesn't necessarily know that what you’re doing is make-believe.”
His desire to take a break after filming Class of ’09 was eventually outweighed by the script he received for Dope Thief, the Apple TV+ limited series in which he and Wagner Moura — a recent best actor winner at Cannes — play a pair of childhood friends in Philadelphia who pose as DEA agents to rob drug dealers. A complex crime story unfolds from there, but as Henry told me, what sold him on the show had nothing to do with the plot or the action. Instead, it was the conversation scene between his and Moura’s characters, Ray and Manny, that opens the series.
“Ray was just so funny and precocious,” Henry says. “The relationship between him and Manny was just so charged with love. He’s trying to talk about how to rob his trap house, but also it’s his birthday and everybody forgot his birthday. And I was like, yeah, I can relate to this.”
Henry wound up serving as an executive producer on the series as well, a role he says he’s played in a more informal way on many other sets before — “ I’m very nosy when it comes to how things are made.” In our podcast conversation, he talked about the extra responsibility of working as a producer, how he plans to take that with him going forward and also answered my own nosy question — when will this Tony nominee finally give us a movie musical?
This is the last of our Emmy season special episodes, with final voting wrapping up on Monday and all the contenders — and us! — getting a bit of a break before nominations are announced on July 15. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed listening in on these bonus conversations, and as always, I’d love to hear from you: katey@theankler.com
