The actor Brian Tyree Henry made his professional debut in 2007, as Tybalt, in a shimmering “Romeo and Juliet” for Shakespeare in the Park. More stage roles followed, then a nimble leap to television, in “Atlanta,” and a turn to film.
I saw it all, or nearly all (not “Godzilla vs. Kong”). So I can’t really explain how I spent so long in a nearly deserted hotel dining room sending increasingly anxious texts to Henry’s publicist, wondering where he was. As I texted, Henry was sitting at a table maybe 20 feet away, in glasses and a baseball cap. The cap had a large B on it.
Some comfort: This also happens to Julia Roberts, his co-star on a Sam Esmail film currently in production in Paris. “He’s kind of this quiet chameleon,” she told me later. “Sometimes I don’t put two and two together immediately. Then I’m like, oh, wait a minute: It’s Brian again.”
Henry, 42, an actor of extraordinary texture, vigor and grace, is tall and relatively broad. He looks, he knows, like a guy who used to play football. (Actually, he was a speech debate kid and a member of the marching band.) That he can disappear into roles, into a restaurant table, speaks to his gift, his craft. But for a man who has spent his life fighting to be seen, who struggles to feel that he belongs in the places he inhabits, it also brings a kind of pain.
“Even you didn’t know me with glasses on,” he said, once I’d shifted to his table. “There’s always just something that people are expecting. Then I come in and they’re just like, ‘Oh, well, that’s not what we want.’ And I’m like, well, this is who I am.”
Soon, Henry will be harder to overlook. On Friday, “Dope Thief,” which brings Henry’s first top billing onscreen, premieres on Apple TV+. Based on a novel by Dennis Tafoya, the limited series is about a small-time Philadelphia grifter named Ray Driscoll who poses as a D.E.A. agent in order to fleece local stash houses. And then he targets the wrong house.
Henry, who believes that Hollywood has never seen him as a series lead, was unusually drawn to Ray. But to play him, he had to wrestle with his own insecurities, the stubborn sense that he doesn’t deserve to be the star. “I used to battle that thing all the time,” he said. “I was like, nobody’s going to want anything if it says ‘Brian Tyree Henry.’”
“I always felt like my existence was an inconvenience for a lot of people,” he added.
Yet that battle allows him to bring unusual depth to men like Ray — men who are overlooked, misjudged, inconvenient. There is Alfred, the drug dealer and rising rapper in “Atlanta”; Daniel, the wrongfully convicted parolee in “If Beale Street Could Talk”; James, the grieving mechanic in “Causeway.”
Henry’s approach to acting is mission-driven, even spiritual. (“It sounds so crunchy granola, but it’s true,” he said, sighing.) He takes on these roles to argue for the worth of such men, to show that they matter, to show their hearts. This work offers a kind of redemption for the characters and for Henry as well.
“I know them,” he said. “I can’t ever forget them. Even if they forget themselves, even if they feel like they’re inconvenient, they’re not. They’re not.”
IN PERSON HENRY is thoughtful, deliberate, wrenchingly honest. His resting face is serious and sleepy-eyed — a kind of marrow-deep exhaustion connects many of his characters — but at times that face dissolves into a smile that is childlike, expectant.
He was raised in Fayetteville, N.C., as the much younger brother of four older sisters. The household was crowded and volatile, and Henry thought of himself as unwanted, a hassle. He was determined to grow up as fast as he could.
“I was the runaway kid,” he said. “The minute that they let go of my hand when I learned how to walk, I ran.”
He can vividly recall his first stage role. At 5, he beat out the other preschool children to play Santa Claus — he remembers pulling down his cotton ball beard and asking for his line. (“Merry Christmas.”) He had a feeling of fantasy, of joy and escape.
At Morehouse College in Atlanta, which he chose mostly because of a scene in “Boyz N The Hood,” he enrolled as a business major. But friends persuaded him to audition for a production of “Antigone” at the school’s sister college, Spelman. He got the lead. Later, visiting professors convinced him to apply to graduate school. Henry was accepted to the Yale School of Drama, where he matriculated still unconvinced that acting was a viable profession.
“I did it because it was saving my life,” he said. “It gave me a place to feel free.”
At Yale, he struggled to feel that he belonged. In a production of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” he was cast as a tree. In his second year, he secured a lead role in a show at the Yale Repertory Theater, a rarity for a drama student, but he felt that his peers didn’t notice or care.
In his final year, a student production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” had a brief run at the Under the Radar festival. His performance of Oshoosi, a man recently released from prison, caught the eye of the theater director Michael Greif, who hired him for “Romeo and Juliet.” Greif can still remember the complexity of that performance.
“There was so much palpable hurt and devotion coupled with his anger,” Greif said. Henry’s career as a professional actor had begun.
The next several years were both difficult and wonderful. Henry lived in an outer corner of Brooklyn and relied on food stamps and bologna sandwiches, but he was doing the thing he loved. Financial security came in 2011, with a role in the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon.” But even though he stayed with the show for three years — He was on Broadway! He could finally afford a monthly MetroCard! — Henry rarely felt comfortable. He didn’t think of himself as a musical theater actor, and he felt that his contributions went unrecognized.
“I just knew I was out of place,” he said. “I was in a theater house that didn’t recognize who I was.”
In 2014 he left, taking a chance on television and film. He soon auditioned for “Atlanta,” a new FX comedy created by Donald Glover. Philosophical, surprising and uncanny, “Atlanta” became a critic’s darling. There was particular enthusiasm for Henry’s Alfred, a drug dealer who’s also a promising rapper known as Paper Boi. “Mr. Henry creates a rich tension between the Paper Boi persona and Alfred, sharp and self-aware, who’s unsettled by his minor celebrity,” James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times.
Henry was also unsettled, particularly as his mother, with whom he was very close, died right after the first season wrapped. But playing Alfred felt important — he wanted to show his joy, his fear, his tenderness, to make people care for a man they might have dismissed.
“Brian understood that there are complexities and layers to people,” LaKeith Stanfield, his “Atlanta” co-star, said. As different as Henry and Alfred are superficially, there are deep similarities, Stanfield noted: Both men were ambitious and wanted to better themselves; both wanted to love and be loved.
By the time “Atlanta” ended, in 2022, Henry had made serious films, like “If Beale Street Could Talk,” directed by Barry Jenkins, and more popcorn fare, like “Godzilla vs. Kong” and “Bullet Train.” He had two Emmy nominations under his belt — one for “Atlanta,” the other for a guest stint on “This Is Us.” In 2022, he received his first Oscar nomination, for “Causeway,” in which he played a New Orleans mechanic, an amputee, who befriends a veteran (Jennifer Lawrence) with a traumatic brain injury.
He gave interviews after that film suggesting that he wouldn’t be using his own pain any more, that he would prioritize his own mental health, his healing. When “Dope Thief” came up, it frightened him — it felt too personal, too exposing.
“Ray scared the [expletive] out of me,” Henry said. “There was nowhere for me to hide.”
But that was also part of the attraction. In the course of the series, Ray, another inconvenient child, heals his relationship with his father. Henry, who was estranged from his father, believed this might be personally cathartic. And the chance to be the star wasn’t one he could ignore.
“Remember,” he said, “I played a tree.”
PETER CRAIG, THE SHOWRUNNER of “Dope Thief,” had admired Henry’s work on “Atlanta.” He was confident that Henry could convey Ray’s cunning, his confusion, his big, wounded heart, sometimes without a word of dialogue.
“He has this ability to be mesmerizing when he’s silent,” Craig said. But even Craig was surprised by the depth of feeling that Henry brought to the role. “It was vulnerable for him to put as much of himself as he did, all that sweetness,” Craig said.
Henry’s father died during filmmaking. Henry came back to set to shoot an unusually taxing scene in which an infected gunshot wound leaves Ray delirious. Looking up from the floor, he was surrounded by pictures of himself as a child in his father’s house. (He had lent them to the set decorating team.) He felt overwhelmed, almost out of his own body. But then the director would yell action, and he would lose himself in the character. The tears came, and he let them come.
Henry doesn’t entirely understand what he does, the deep wells that he draws from for each role. Wagner Moura, his co-star on “Dope Thief,” observed some of this process.
“He’s a very spiritual person; he pays attention to signs and coincidences,” Moura said on a video call. “He’s very connected to his inner self. It does seem very intense.” But it was also a pleasure, Moura noted. Henry would drop that intensity the moment a scene ended and revert to his gentler self.
Henry echoed this: “I want people to know that this is who I am, to make sure people can really get glimpses of who Brian is.”
Henry is still trying to sort out how to be comfortable with who he is — even now, when he finds himself, say, on a movie set alongside a big star like Julia Roberts, he will catch himself wondering if he deserves to be there. He doesn’t speak of romantic relationships, and he suggested that he has a hard time maintaining them, in part because of his relationship with himself.
“It is lonely,” he said. “But I’m still figuring it out.”
In the meantime, there will be more roles to play, more men to redeem, more reasons to prove to himself that he belongs in the life he has made, to broaden out that life.
“I just want to stretch people’s imagination of where I can be and what I can do,” he said. “I really want you to just pull back on the rubber band, the elasticity of your mind to be like, Oh, yeah, we want him to exist there, too.”
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