Actor Brian Tyree Henry had half a dozen new projects to discuss, but he needed first, for one moment, to focus on Beychella.
“Come on now. It would be a disservice if I didn’t,” he said when we spoke recently. “I rock with Bey.”
The Atlanta star felt a special connection to Beyoncé’s history-making, historically black college-themed, headlining Coachella set, which featured the spectacular regalia of black Greek and band culture. Henry went to Morehouse; when Season 2 of Atlanta wrapped, he gave each of his colleagues custom Greek-themed line jackets, which depicted imagery of each cast member’s most difficult episode, respectively. Lakeith Stanfield’s jacket featured a piano with colored keys, the object his character nearly dies for in Episode 6, titled “Teddy Perkins.” Zazie Beetz’s jacket showed a ping-pong table from Episode 4, “Helen.” There was no question which one would be on Henry’s own jacket: Episode 8, “Woods.”
On the surreal FX series, created by Donald Glover, Henry plays Alfred, an Atlanta-based rapper who goes by the stage name Paper Boi. It’s the part that propelled him from unknown character actor to vaunted rising star; His 2018 schedule is packed with six high-profile movies, a starring role in a Broadway drama, and the second season of Atlanta. In Season 1 of the Emmy-winning series, Henry’s character went from the couch to the come-up as he dropped a popular song and earned acclaim in his hometown. In Season 2, Alfred’s been a bit more adrift, caught between the thrills of newfound fame and the perils of sustaining it. The show has stayed mostly in the present tense with Alfred—we don’t know much about his childhood, his family, or the inner world that made him who he is. In “Woods,” one of those layers is stripped away. He’s shown struggling with the anniversary of his mother’s death and slowly descending into a cloudy depression. He gets bullied, robbed, and scared into submission. By the end, he’s bloodied and emotionally broken, having endured a relentlessly chaotic day.
Henry described it as the “most terrifying episode I’ve ever done,” not least because of its real-world parallels. At the end of Atlanta Season 1, Henry’s mother, whom he called his best friend, died in a car accident. “Woods” is dedicated to her. As Henry prepared to return for Season 2, he remembered feeling almost afraid of everything it represented: “I’m going back to the place where I suffered the most loss,” he thought. Though he tried to present a strong front, it was difficult to maintain the facade. “Trying to pull it together is when you usually collapse the most.” When it came time to channel that grief on screen, Henry felt special care emanating from everyone on set—director Hiro Murai, the crew, the writers, and Glover, whom Henry considers a play cousin—an honorary family member. “It was an episode that truly healed me,” he said.
Henry has excelled of late playing a certain kind of upright, but emotionally vulnerable, men who don’t have anyone looking out for them. He’s spent much of the spring on Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, which also stars Michael Cera, Chris Evans, and Bel Powley. Henry plays William, a moralistic security guard whose brother gets caught up in a horrible crime. The role itself is daunting, and not just because of the emotional heavy lifting it demands: Henry also had to learn a Herculean amount of dialogue. Is there a trick to memorizing all those lines? “No,” Henry said with a laugh; just good old-fashioned memorization. Which is fine, he continued, because no one wants perfect theater—they want something that lives and breathes. Henry loves the anxiety of theater, even if he doesn’t love the way William’s guilt and misery hang around the actor like an albatross, or the log of dread that lurches in his stomach before each show. “I have to find a way to leave his ass at the theater,” he said. “Every single performance is different, and it’s creeping me out.”
This isn’t unusual for Henry, who tethers himself so deeply to his characters that he sees them all surrounding him at an imaginary table, Dinner for Schmucks-style. (He loves the 2010 Steve Carrell comedy.) With his star on the rise, there will be more guests at that table this year—and there is something almost cosmic-level alignment going on with each of his upcoming film roles. In Hotel Artemis, he’ll play a brother to his real-life best friend of 11 years, Sterling K. Brown. (Henry is the messy “fuck-up,” while Brown is more of the vintage “Bruce Willis” type.) In Widows, he acts alongside Viola Davis; just last year, he had a role on her ABC drama, How to Get Away with Murder, but he didn’t actually get any scenes with the Oscar winner. In If Beale Street Could Talk, Henry will star in a James Baldwin adaptation; for years, he has kept a copy of the author’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time in his backpack as a talisman of sorts. In White Boy Rick, he shares billing with Matthew McConaughey; O.K. there’s nothing particularly karmic about that, though McConaughey is the cowboy cosmologist of our time.
“He has that aura,” Henry said of the philosophical Texan, who (naturally) doled out wisdom on the set. “He is channeled in. That dude is in there.”
That said, McConaughey’s wrap gifts to Henry were a bit more tethered to reality: a nice bottle of tequila and a note that said, “Looking forward to getting frozen custard one day”—a reference to a dessert lassoed into the film’s plot. Henry still has the note and usually keeps it in his bag, alongside his Baldwin. The actor is naturally humble, and he aggressively downplayed any suggestion that he is going to have a very busy awards season come fall—even though he probably will. (If Lobby Hero gets the Tonys attention it deserves, his summer could be packed as well.)
“I never thought in a million years I’d be going from project to project,” he said. “Nothing ever taught me this was possible.”
More important, he remembers what it’s like not to be busy—to sweat from audition to audition, reading sides and hoping for the best. He is tired, but he is also grateful to be tired.
“This exhaustion, if you could bottle it and make it a Gatorade, I’d drink it,” he said.
