Why ‘Dope Thief’ Hit So Close to Home for Brian Tyree Henry

[This story contains mild spoilers through episode six of Dope Thief.]

Dope Thief, the eight-episode Apple TV+ series from Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman co-scribe Peter Craig and iconic Blade Runner and Gladiator director Ridley Scott, is more than its premise of Ray and his friend Manny posing as DEA agents to take money from small-time drug dealers.

Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) is trapped by circumstances beyond his control. His mother died when he was young and his father Bart (Ving Rhames) is a career criminal serving a lengthy prison sentence. In their absence, his father’s white girlfriend Theresa (Kate Mulgrew) stepped in to raise him. In Manny (Wagner Moura), the Brazilian immigrant he met when they were both locked up, Ray has found somebody he cares for like a little brother or child, but who he may be losing a bit now that Manny has found love with Sherry (Liz Caribel).

One job Ray and Manny pull on bad intel comes with big money and big problems, with a gravelly-voiced unnamed drug kingpin and an endless army now out to kill them and the real DEA, convinced they are really kingpins, out to bust them. The twists and turns of this high-octane adaptation of crime author Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 debut novel are both physically and emotionally grueling. And Ray takes it on himself to figure it all out.

The Oscar-nominated Henry, who is also an executive producer, learned and shared a lot as Ray in Dope Thief. Working with Craig and Scott, he tells The Hollywood Reporter, taught him “to truly lean into the fearlessness of who I am as an actor and as a person.” In the conversation below, Henry shares how many of Ray’s key relationships hit very close to home, namely the emotional parallels of Ray’s strained connection to his estranged father and his comfort with “Ma” Theresa.

Joining forces with Wagner Moura — whose breakout role as Pablo Escobar in Narcos is grounded on screen in the drug world, like Henry’s role as Paper Boi in Atlanta — he says helped bring heightened awareness and compassion to what really happens to too many young men of color like Manny and Ray who are trapped by poverty and limited opportunities since birth. Ray’s connection to Son (portrayed by veteran actor Dustin Nguyen, whose career spans back to the 1980s with 21 Jump Street), says Henry, reflects Ray’s longing for family. By series’ end, Henry hopes all of these elements will stir compassion for all the Rays of the world.

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Why did you take on Dope Thief?

Peter Craig was a huge draw for me. I’ve been a fan of him and his writing for a while. Ridley Scott was another element that was really cool. I was like, “I gotta tick that box. It’d be amazing to be able to work with Ridley in this lifetime,” and then also to be able to be a lead in a show. I’ve been pretty much in my supporting character bag, and I really wanted to explore what it was like to actually be the central focus. Also, the executive producing credit was not a bad, tempting little nugget to dangle in front of me, because that was an amazing transition. All those elements combined made it a pretty simple choice.

But beyond that, it was truly the character Ray, himself, that made me very excited. I had not seen a character like Ray. I definitely had not been approached for characters like Ray. There was such an amazing emotional arc and trajectory that Ray goes through that I really wanted to push myself and see if it was something I could do. So it was truly an opportunity to stretch myself and, boy, did it. Be careful what you ask for, because Dope Thief was really one of the hardest projects I’ve been a part of, and Ray was one of the hardest characters I’ve done, but one of the most fulfilling.

Who is Ray to you?

Ray reminded me a lot of me at different points of my life. You’re watching this character with his back against the wall trying to make decisions of how to survive. I have felt that way before. You’re watching this character who is dealing with feeling like an inconvenient child, where if all these elements of his life from his father and his mother are removed, he’s pretty much a loner. I have felt like that at one point.

You also meet a person who was absolutely trying to figure out who he was in various stages of grief and loneliness. And I, too, have felt that way. Because I had done all the work that I had felt very proud of personally for Brian, I felt that I could step into a character like Ray and actually lay down a lot of the burdens that I’ve been carrying. I really wanted to give Ray an opportunity to know what it felt like to see that there’s light on the other side, and to really go piece by piece to walk him through how to unburden himself with all these different things that he had been carrying for most of his life.

If it was Brian five years ago, I don’t think there’s any way I would have been able to approach a character like Ray, or that Ray would have even presented himself to me because I hadn’t even started to do the work of how to feel better, how to heal, how to work through my own personal grief. I’m really grateful that he came when he did, because I walked away from Ray and from that show feeling like a completely different person and feeling incredibly anchored in the man I wanted to be today.

Talk about two of the most important relationships in Ray’s life, the one with “Ma” or Theresa and the one with Manny.

I’ll start with Manny. So the character Manny is very complex, but also one of the simplest relationships that Ray has because Manny, at this point, has always been a part of Ray’s life, and the way that Manny has been a part of Ray’s life was always underneath the thumb of oppression. They had been incarcerated since they were 15 years old, and they found this safety in one another. They found this comfort in one another. Manny is played by the amazing Wagner Moura, and we would have these conversations where we would be like: this is actually a love story if you think about it.

The connection between these two boys into their manhood is a connection that nobody on the outside would ever understand. Now they’ve been thrust into freedom out in the world and they don’t really know how to be. Most of their lives have been behind bars. Most of their lives have been enclosed in prison cells. Most of their lives they have been told what to do, where to eat, how to be, and now they’re put into the world and into society and have to figure out who they are as men, while also having the moniker of being cons and convicts and felons. At the end of the day, I feel like the relationship that the two of them created is one that is so intimate and so special because they’re all each other has.

And Theresa?

Then you add the element of my mother, Theresa, played brilliantly by Kate Mulgrew, who happened to be in love with my father, and was then given this responsibility/burden of raising his son because he goes to jail. You have this white woman who now has this Black child that she has to take care of. That relationship made me think about the relationships I had in my personal life when I was growing up. I always adopted different moms because my mom was in D.C., and I was sent to live with my father in North Carolina. So I was yearning in those formative years to try to find a connection to a motherly energy.

I found myself accumulating different moms at different times in my life just because that connection was something I was longing for in my formative years. And so I could really understand that need that Ray had to have this attachment to Theresa, especially with his father being absent, especially with all the resentment he was carrying for that man, all the resentment for all the people who ever left him, because Ray’s life is kind of an [accumulation] of a series of people who left him. That was something I really wanted to show and [also] give the viewers an opportunity to kind of really care for him and really understand how he ended up where he was, and to have compassion for him.

The beauty is that Theresa kind of chooses Ray, too.

Right. There’s a part that was an obligation to my father. Because she truly loved this man, her love manifested in, “well, of course, I’ll take care of your son. Of course, I’ll be there for you with the hopes of our love still being strong.” And then you end up seeing that Ray and Theresa have one of the strongest bonds that there is. There is a deep love. Even though she calls him [a name] every episode, it’s still out of a place of gratitude.

I often jump between “has to” and “choose to” because sometimes some things are put upon you. And I think that Ray always felt that he was put upon her. That’s why I keep talking about this inconvenient child thing. So that’s why you see him throughout the series doing everything he can [for her]. Like the first episode, his whole life is turned upside down because he thinks that she’s dying. He thinks that the one person who actually kept a roof over his head and food in his tummy is about to go and won’t tell him why [and], you kind of see him spiral in that. There’s this whole monologue he has about when is a stranger not a stranger anymore. At some point she was a stranger to him, and he knows the differences between who they are and how the world and society sees them. But when does a stranger stops being a stranger anymore? Oh, right, when it’s anchored in love, when it’s anchored in seeing that person for who they are and wanting to be there for them because you can be.

Kate and I would have these discussions quite often because it’s so crazy our personal relationship manifested into that of Theresa and Ray’s. I call her Mom to this day, and you can see that it is a love that is truly bonded by loss, by necessity, by actual perseverance to survive and love. Like, even in the first episode, Ray is tripping that nobody’s remembered it’s his birthday. He’s doing all this stuff, and he’s taking care of these people, and no one remembers his birthday. And turns out, everybody remembered his birthday, especially Theresa, so much so that she’s giving him a $50 bill. He gives it back to her, because “you need it more than I do.” And that’s family, right?

At the end of the day, Dope Thief sits under the umbrella of family. This is a show about what it means to be family, because Manny was his family for so many years in this system that tried to absolutely break them and keep them down. There is a dependency on one another. There is this place of safety. There is this place of all the secrets that other people don’t know, and then what happens when we keep making these wrong turns. That’s the thing with Ray that he feels so indebted to everyone. He feels like he can take care of everyone. But then you have these scenes where he’s sitting at home alone, reminiscing, dealing with insomnia because he’s remembering the first love in his life, whose life he ended up taking by accident, like those demons that just keep swirling around him, and my heart ached for him, like my heart really wanted him to find a place of peace, healing and to not carry that load anymore.

So many people see you and Wagner as Paper Boi and Pablo Escobar. While Dope Thief is in the same space, you guys bring an entirely different energy here that doesn’t exist in your two most famous or, rather, infamous roles. Was that attractive to you as well?

Yeah, having Pablo and Paper Boi together, that’s the best pairing out there. What me and Wagner also talk about is Alfred and Pablo were about that life. That is a life they weren’t afraid of. Whereas, [for] Ray and Manny, this isn’t a life they wanted. This isn’t something they chose. I mean they did choose to rob trap houses, but it’s not something that they wanted; it’s something they figured out would be the best scheme in order to survive, and, also, they’re terrible at it. They’re not skilled at all. One heist turns into two heists, and then it’s supposed to be over, but they’re not skilled at all. And I think a lot of that is just a mirror being held up to them about how the system kept them as children in a way.

I always believe that when you put Black and Brown men into a system and incarcerate them, the younger they are in the system, [it] mentally keeps them that way. The system keeps them in that place. [Mentally they are] that age that they were first locked up, and so now you have them out playing dress up and robbing trap houses that are filled with candy and drugs, and not really knowing what the next step is, and thinking that it’s all so seamless and easy. And that’s the difference, I think, between what me and Wagner have to do playing these characters than the other characters that people know us for is that you’re watching us be amateurs. You’re watching us be afraid. You’re watching us be scared. You’re watching us fighting for a sense of normalcy. You’re watching these two men who inherently are still boys in their minds, you’re watching them trying to find a way to survive that way.

How did you and Ving feed off each other to create the angry tension between Ray and his father Bart?

Ving is, as you know, a legend. I think the very first day I got to meet Ving was in a prison. So it’s me visiting him and the character Bart is weak physically, like something going on, and the very first day is this scene that you see in episode two, where I’m trying to figure out how he’s connected to somebody who gave us up, I remember reading that scene that Peter wrote. [Even with] very different upbringings, [Peter’s and my] connection to our dads was kind of very similar, in that they were men that we didn’t really know. Even though they were present in our lives, there was a lot of resentment, a lot of frustration, a lot of like, “Who are these men? Why did they make the choices they made?”

So you have this moment where his father is like, “I did everything I could to take care of you,” and [Ray’s] like, “Your girlfriend took care of me! What are you talking about? What revisionist history are you talking about? And the reason that I’m afraid to be close to anybody is because I watched how you treated my mother.” This whole display is in public, in a prison where Ray probably was housed before. [Now] he’s on the other side of the glass talking to his dad, who has the power to bring that kind of rage out of him because he’s still not admitting anything to Ray. What his father could really do is be like, “Hey, man, I’m sorry that went on. I actually love you.”

I never talked about my relationship with my father to Ving. I didn’t ever want it to be something he had to take into his scenes. But, man, he really gave me a place to go and to really let things out. All the things I wanted to say to my father, personally, I was able to do through this show and through Ray. It was such a big part of what was keeping Ray down and keeping him in a place of just anger and frustration. So, Ving was wonderful to play Bart. I can’t think of anybody else who could have done what Ving did.

What’s Ray’s relationship to Son (Dustin Nguyen)?

It’s another collection of male figures, right? Son saw a skillset in Ray and found a way to not just manipulate it but capitalize off of it. I do believe that Son views Ray as family. I do believe that Son holds a special place for Ray, but, at the end of the day, Son has a family. Son has a wife, Son has kids, Son has a home, Son has all these things, and Ray goes there because I think they’re all things that he’s longed for in his life. I think Ray has created this amazing picture book of how he thinks family is supposed to look like for him, like all the things that he’s yearned for.

It’s like, “Oh, that’s beautiful that Son has this wonderful, nuclear family too.” And even Son says, “You came over here because you wanted to see what a family looks like … You wouldn’t come over here today, if that wasn’t it. You would have come on a Monday when everyone’s in school and at work … But you came on a Sunday, which means you want to see what it looked like.”

I think that’s what you get throughout Dope Thief with these different flashes of Ray, these fantasies of what his life could have been had he had XYZ, had he done XYZ. You’re watching a man who’s so tormented by a mistake he made, by one little mistake, and that mistake came out of loving somebody. I really wanted to showcase a character like that for people because it’s so easy for us to see people who come out of certain situations, who may have been incarcerated, who may have made the wrong move, and we immediately put this thing on them. We immediately go, “They don’t deserve to have that. We would never be in this situation.” But we could at some given point in time.

So, at the end of the day, what I want viewers to walk away with is an absolute deep well of care for Ray. Yes, he’s an antihero. Technically, he’s your antagonist, but, at the same time, he is still deserving of being loved and still deserving of being able to let all of that shit go. And I think that’s what you’re following for eight episodes, is me trying to get Ray to a place of being able to let go.

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Dope Thief, which premiered on Apple TV+ March 14 with two of its eight episodes, releases its finale April 25 on Apple TV+.