‘Doing this show was some of the best healing I’ve had’

Brian Tyree Henry talks to Hannah J Davies about acting as therapy, the ties that bind him to his character in new crime series Dope Thief’ and how it’s really a love story in disguise

- Hannah J Davies

Your second year at Yale School of Drama, says Brian Tyree Henry, is the one that makes or breaks you”. As well as rigorous Shakespeare studies including staging the Bard’s works ona shoestring Henry was also cast as a lead in a Yale Repertory Theatre production of Dance of the Holy Ghosts: A Play on Memory by the African-American playwright Marcus Gardley, appearing alongside professional actors. It was a rare opportunity for a student, and one that he relished. But Henry – who had previously honed his talents at Atlanta’s majority-Black Morehouse College – didn’t feel as though his efforts were truly recognised while at the Ivy League institution.

“It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, 17 years later, that one of my classmates was like, I’m filming something and going to school at the same time, and I couldn't help thinking about you,” says Henry. His friend acknowledged just how much work he must have put in at the time. “I was like, you have no idea how badly I needed to hear that. I didn’t think that anybody cared. It was really nice to get that validation and affirmation that what I did was being seen.”

It might seem unusual that Henry – the star of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, who has enjoyed Emmy and Oscar nods – is thinking back to his college days, but he has had reason to of late. His latest project is an Apple TV+ series, Dope Thief, a zippy crime caper that slowly unfurls into a high-stakes drama. The feeling of not being seen, he says, “trickles into my character, Ray. He has this moniker of being the inconvenient child. And I had been feeling like that for most of my life. That’s why acting was so important to me. In the places and spaces where I’m not recognised or encouraged or even treated like I matter … when I act, I feel safe and protected.”