Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Dope Thief”
Between its high-octane action sequences and quippy dialogue, Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief” may seem like a typical crime thriller. But for Brian Tyree Henry, it was a chance for him to move beyond his best-known role as rapper Paper Boi in Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” and through the grief of losing his mother in 2016.
“I remember when I lost my mother, at the same time I lost my name, because all of a sudden, here are people greeting me on the street, like, ‘Oh, Paper Boi.’ But I’m my mother’s son. My name is Brian,” said Henry, who was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2023 for “Causeway.” “I had to deal with the loss of what my life used to be. A big part of why I took on [‘Dope Thief’ character] Ray was to find my name again, honestly, to find out who I am. This show gave me a place to reclaim a lot of things.”
It also earned Henry, also an EP on the series, an Emmy nod for Lead Actor in a
Limited Series, his third nomination after “Atlanta” and “This Is Us.” Created by Peter Craig, “Dope Thief “is the story of Ray and Manny (Wagner Moura), best friends who met as teen inmates and whose scheme to pose as DEA agents and rob drug dealers puts them in grave danger.
TheWrap: How did you create the relationship between Manny and Ray?
Brian Tyree Henry: You have these two men who were not only incarcerated when they were 15-year-old boys, but stripped of their freedom. This system has told them that they ain’t gonna be s–t. And you have to feel that need and that longing for one another. You have to feel that kind of reaching out to see if the other one’s there. If you notice, throughout the series, we are in close proximity to one another all the time, be it in a car, at church, on a bus. Because I think that that kind of connection between men who have been incarcerated is real. And I think both of us were at a place in our careers where we really wanted to turn the viewers’ focus of how they saw us on its head. It’s really easy to see Wagner and go, “Pablo Escobar.” But it’s another thing to see him holding a gun and be
scared.
Ray shows vulnerability throughout the show; we see him cry at least once. How did you channel that?
The thing to remember about Ray and Manny is that they are not professionals, right? They are in over their head, and they really don’t have systems in place to care for [themselves]. And the systems that they do have, they manipulate. You know, Ray is going to [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings and he’s still using. To see his struggle with grief and loss was real to me, to see him struggling with being an inconvenient [parentless] child. It was important to me to see him battling addiction and battling with the truth.
I really wanted to see Ray make it on the other side. I didn’t want him to be another Black man lost to a statistic and to be a number that was just forgotten, which is how I feel about every man I play. I always want people to have a desperate desire to see me through to the end, because that’s where I’m coming from.
In the final episode, I kept waiting for Manny to appear, even though he has died. But he never does. What was it like to film the finale without Wagner?
That’s loss, right? It was hard. His last scene was him overdosing in a cell. I came to set that day and I sat outside of that cell the entire time, sitting on the ground. I had a whole party for him, like, four cakes, all the Brazilian food that anyone could eat. I carried a boombox — like “Say Anything” — playing Brazilian music. I think I put a “Cat in the Hat” hat on top of him. And to see the joy on his face, everyone felt it. I was determined to send him off with a bang, and we did.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama issue here.
