As a kid, Brian Tyree Henry was blind for about a week.Well, not really, but he really committed to pretending, just as he did when he adopted a British accent for days or started his own sign language.
Henry grew up with four much older sisters, which propelled him to grow up fast. “I was always trying to catch up with the adults,” he recalls. “And rather of asking questions I would observe and then go do it.”
But he also clung to the fun of childhood, especially as he needed to both entertain himself and strive to get attention. He’d rearrange the furniture to act out scenes he’d learned from his favorite babysitter, a.k.a. television. (Nickelodeon took him from “The World of David the Gnome,” which is “still one of my favorite shows,” to “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”) He also transformed a dollhouse into a movie set. “My sisters would say, ‘Why is this house upside down?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, there was a hurricane,'” he says.
Growing up this way is “definitely a big part of why I act,” says Henry. Just as at home, Henry has garnered attention for performances without being the star of the show. He earned Tony nominations (for “Lobby Hero”), an Oscar nod (“Causeway”) and two Emmy nods (“This Is Us” and “Atlanta”), but all were in supporting or guest roles. with Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief,” he’s now carrying the show and it has lead to his third Emmy nod, his first for lead actor.
In previous interviews previewing “Causeway” and then for “Dope Thief,” Henry struck me as thoughtful and hyper-articulate about the projects he’s in and the characters he plays, but also so open about how his personal pain and vulnerability fed his acting.(His mother, with whom he was close, died in a car accident while he was finishing the first season of “atlanta”; his “Causeway” character lost a leg in a car accident. In “Dope Thief,” Ray has a tumultuous relationship with his father; Henry lived with his father during middle and high school but says he never had a male role model and was working thru his own traumas by playing Ray. Then his own father died while the series was filming.)
“That was the best experience ever,” he says, especially becuase he got to perform the scene for wilson when the playwright was honored in a ceremony at the school. Soon after, henry was getting his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. Hanging out in front of a bar late one night he saw Wilson (whose play “Radio Golf” was there) walk by and summoned the courage to introduce himself.
“In my mind, it was like meeting Gandhi or the pope,” he says. They chatted about their Morehouse encounter. The next day, Yale dean James Bundy called Henry in to say that Wilson told Bundy that accepting Henry to the program was the best decision he’d ever made. “That was hands down one of the best moments in my life.”
Soon after, Henry was sleeping on an air mattress with a slow leak in the furthest reaches of Brooklyn, stealing cable from neighbors, eating bologna sandwiches and collecting bus transfers to help with his commute to Manhattan’s theaters. While he admits there were times when he “questioned weather it was sustainable,” he loved it all. “I honestly didn’t know what else I was meant to do.”
