In ‘Dope Thief,’ Brian Tyree Henry Goes on the Run of His Life

Brian Tyree Henry was deep into filming the time-hopping FX limited series Class of ‘09 when he received the pilot script for Dope Thief. The actor had jumped straight from his Emmy-nominated, four-season turn on FX’s Atlanta to this new project, which demanded an awful lot. On this particular Class of ‘09 early morning—3:00, to be exact-ish—Henry was in full prosthetics playing a future version of his character. He was worn out. The last thing he wanted to do was read another pilot. “I was like, I’m done with TV for a little bit,” he says. He told his manager no to Dope Thief. She pressed him to read it; he said no again. Eventually, she convinced him. By the time he got to episode two? “I promise you that I couldn’t stop reading it.”

for 2022’s Causeway) knew his involvement would need to extend beyond being an actor-for-hire. “You’re dealing with this young man who is trapped in a world that doesn’t want to see him succeed—that is fraught with violence and theft and drug use and daddy issues—and I was like, this is right in my lane,” Henry says. “I knew that, emotionally and physically, it would be incredibly daunting. But you have a choice to make—you can reveal these parts of yourself that you try to protect and keep hidden.”

So Henry asked creator Peter Craig, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Town and Top Gun: Maverick, to be a true partner on Dope Thief, and came away with his first executive-producer credit. He wanted to collaborate on music and location. He wanted input on the scripts. Most of all, he wanted to protect Ray—a character we meet making bad decisions, sure, but who’s gradually fleshed out as a child of the system unable to find a way out. He looks out for his closest parental figure, Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), while still facing down his painful past with his incarcerated father (Ving Rhames).

“You take a magnifying glass to Ray and you realize deep down at the fiber of who he is—that’s really what he’s chasing, the connection to his father,” Henry says. “He’s trying to figure out who he wants to be as a man.”

The conversations between Craig and Henry ran deep. “We’re confidants and collaborators and we talk about everything,” Craig says. Henry didn’t know what to expect in building a relationship with someone from the “completely opposite side of the tracks,” so he dove right in. “I was like, ‘What’s your deal with your father? Because I’ve got my stories—what’s your story?’” Henry says. “We sat down and we unpacked everything about our fathers in our first meeting…. When someone else’s trauma meets your trauma, you can finally lay all your armor down.”

Henry admits that filming could take its toll—the material hit him hard, and he wanted to do Ray justice. “He is a character that has never felt cared for, and so the fact that this whole story is following him was something that was very scary for me,” Henry says. “I was like, well, this show hinges on his survival, really—it really hinges on whether he makes it.”

Craig was drawn to the imperfections of Dope Thief’s heroes. “I love stories about con men, I love stories about fraud, I love characters who think they’re on the periphery of something and they’re somehow morally impervious—as if they’re going to protect themselves from the real darkness of it,” he says. When he was asked about adapting the novel, he quickly got to work, changing the book’s setting to an ominous, immediate-post COVID moment. “Everybody’s a fuck-up on some level, from our heroes all the way to law enforcement,” Craig says. “It just seemed that like that COVID rollout, that era when nobody knew what was really happening, was the perfect era to really make a mess for everybody to live in.”

Following some stop-and-start projects, Craig also got to at last collaborate with Ridley Scott, who helmed the pilot alongside Oscar-winning cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mank), smack in between Napoleon and Gladiator II. “Erik came over to me and just went, ‘Ever seen Gone in 60 Seconds?’” Craig says with a laugh. “He was framing these shots as fast as he could possibly go, one after another—because Ridley is relentless. Ridley’s always, ‘Go, go, go, go. What are we waiting for?’” For Henry, Scott’s singular approach to filmmaking—moving at that rapid pace amid a massive multi-camera setup—proved inspiring. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, and all I look for is an actor to make me go, I never thought of that,’” Henry says. “How do you make a genius like Ridley Scott go, I never thought of that? But then your creative self gets to say, ‘I’m going to try.’”

Dope Thief went on to face significant challenges in production. Filming began two years ago on location in Philadelphia, with Better Call Saul alum Michael Mando in the role of Manny. Moura eventually took over after Mando abruptly left the series; Deadline reported at the time that this was due to “an on-set physical altercation with another cast member.” Asked about what unfolded, Craig says “there were conflicts on set,” but pushes back on the narrative that any specific interaction led to Mando’s departure.

“He just didn’t match the role, really, is what happened,” Craig says. “Michael wanted to play somebody that was much more of a traditional sort of action hero. He’s an incredible actor, but sometimes the suit doesn’t fit.” (Mando could not immediately be reached for comment.) Moura was then cast in the part on a Friday before starting filming that Monday. “It was so fun to watch a guy who played Pablo Escobar play somebody who’s actually wound up in the drug world and just rolled over by it,” Craig says. “Wagner got to play both ends of what the drug trade does to America.”

A few months later, Dope Thief shut down indefinitely due to the 2023 WGA strike, and then the actors’ strike to follow. “I always feel like, ‘Is this going to happen?’” Craig says. “We were always keeping the faith and just buried in the process.” Henry, meanwhile, was so committed that he stayed in Philadelphia so as to keep living in Ray’s skin. During that time, his father passed away (on Thanksgiving, no less). The first big scene Henry had to shoot when filming resumed, after a seven-month hiatus, involved a pivotal turning point between Ray and his father. “The universe has a very casual but loud way of making you confront things,” Henry says. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done as an actor, to have to show up and deal with that, but I’ve never felt more protected.”

You can feel relief in both Henry and Craig’s voices, with Dope Thief on the verge of finally premiering, years after cameras started rolling. “It still feels surreal that we’re in this phase of it now,” Craig says. The seven-episode season, which eventually, greatly diverges from the source novel’s plot, is closed-ended enough to feel satisfying on its own, but leaves the door open for more seasons. “That was the hard thing about ending it—we felt like we had to do both,” Craig says.

Wherever it winds up, Henry is still taking much of the experience in. The bonds he developed with Craig and, later, Moura: “I yearned to know what we’re going to be like when we’re 70-year-old men together on the streets of Brazil hanging out. I found a brother in him.” The introspective work that went into playing Ray: “You have to expose more of your cracks, and there’s not enough drywall to fill in those cracks.” And of course, the fate of Ray himself, which you’ll have to watch Dope Thief to find out.

“I’ve never really seen a character like Ray get any shine,” Henry says. “When we think about thieves in any way, there’s something that we automatically seal. But I’m hoping that through the portrayal of what I give Ray, people change the way they think about that in him…. I really want people to check in on him. I really want people to think about him.”

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