Brian Tyree Henry returns to TV with ‘Dope Thief'

Boston Globe

14-03-2025

But the series remains grounded as a character study of Ray, who is fiercely loyal to Manny and to Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), the woman who raised him, while struggling to come to terms with his father, Bart (Ving Rhames).
The success of balancing those two mandates falls largely on Brian Tyree Henry, who also serves as executive producer.
Henry has been nominated for a Tony Award ('Lobby Hero'), an Oscar ('Causeway'), and two Emmys ('This Is Us' and 'Atlanta,' the show that served as his breakout), and he brings all those skills to bear here, infusing Ray with wit and intelligence but also rage, frustration, and emotional desperation.
Henry spoke recently by video about 'Dope Thief.'
You were reluctant to start another series. What won you over?
The first episode just exploded with this crazy conversation between Ray and his best friend, and I thought, 'What? There's no way the show was starting this way.' I had never read dialogue like that right out the gate.
And I was intrigued by the character development between these two men, Ray and Manny; I'd been searching to find that familial brotherly bond in a role. I hadn't really explored a character like Ray and I knew it was going to push me to the limit, which excited me.
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Wagner Moura in "Dope Thief."
Apple TV+
What did you like about being an executive producer?
I'm on the ground running around, so I could bond and mend those bridges between actor and crew and actor and director, especially on television where you have different directors for different episodes and pages can change at any moment.
I'm a theater guy, so I come from the land of collaboration.
You can't put up a play without really talking to props and sound and stage managers. In film and TV, it's easy to just show up and do your job, but I'm not an actor who works that way. I have to know every piece that's working to put this story together, so the role of EP felt natural, but it was also exciting and quite addictive, actually.
Ray is a child of the system still trying to figure out who he wants to be as a man. He makes bad decisions, but often he's starting from bad circumstances. How did that factor into your portrayal?
I wanted to make sure there was some compassion for Ray, because there's been a lack of compassion for him most of his life.
The incarceration rate amongst Black and brown men in Philly is one of the highest in the country, and you can juxtapose that against what the city stands for as the birthplace of this country, where the Constitution was signed.
It's also the birthplace of the penitentiary.
Exactly. This system was stacked against Ray from the beginning. His father was in the system most of his life. Studies show that when somebody in your life is incarcerated, it can be a pipeline for you to go into institutions. Ray has been in the system since he was 15, not because of drugs, not because of violence, but because of an accident, and then the system threw the book at him. So Ray always had to deal with the fact that the moniker attached to him is that he's an ex-con.
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I think about 'Breaking Bad' and Walter White, who was a privileged white man. There's a scene where he gets pulled over by the cops and starts yelling at them for inconveniencing him. That's not our world. As a Black man, the stakes are always so present and always so heightened.
How did you relate to Ray?
The show reflected how I felt I was walking in the world. Ray gave me a place to lay down a lot of burdens. A lot of the characters that choose me have a connection or hold a mirror up to me, but Ray is the closest to me in his emotionality and his connection to his family, to his grief, to his generational trauma.
I just try to pull from a well of a yearning that I have. I'm always trying to be stoic and the person of strength, but if I sit in silence and someone asks, 'Hey, can we get you something?' And it's like, 'Yes, please. Anything.' There's that desperation to be seen and cared for.
You've
on 'Atlanta' helped you process your mother's death. Since your dad died during 'Dope Thief,' I was wondering how that impacted both you and the way you played Ray.
A big reason Peter [Craig] and I joined together to make this show was because of our connections with our dads, because we needed to figure out how to lay it down. Through Ray's connection with his dad, I was partly trying to figure out my connection, or lack thereof, to my father.
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I will always be in such a debt of gratitude to Peter because he walked with me on that journey every single day. We had conversations about the yearning for that male connection — I never really had a male role model in my life.
We had to figure out how to come to grips with being these inconvenient children in our families. We had to figure it out because here we are in the world as men. The world is telling us that we need to be men and we need to be mature in this way. We still are reflections of our fathers, and our fathers are with us, but what do we do when they're making the choice to not be a part of our lives?
The wounds were still there. All the trauma and all the pain that I carried from my father had become a narrative for me in a way.
Then I lost my father right before filming the episode where there's this huge revelation about Ray's father in the series. When he passed, I thought, 'What do I do now? I don't need it anymore. But who am I without that?' Ray was going through that too.
Grief is a lifetime thing, it's something that you carry, but it never really goes away, so you have to figure out how to process it. When you're living the life of a character who has had a similar relationship to their father as you, it can be therapeutic, but it is often not enough.
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So even now, I'm still searching. Ray really helped me get closer to that grief and also to that relief.
Interview was edited for length and clarity.