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For Brian Tyree Henry, ‘Atlanta’s’ rapper on the rise Paper Boi is still just Alfred, trying to get by

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Brian Tyree Henry can trace his call to acting back to his senior year in high school when he was performing a dramatic monologue in a play staged for his fellow classmates serving detention.

“I was terrified,” he recalled during a recent visit to The Times’ video studio. “'Cause they were dead quiet when I was doing my scene. And I collapse on the stage and all I hear from the back is, ‘You suck!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, acting. That's what I got to do.’”

So he did.

Henry’s fame has been steadily on the rise ever since. After making his Broadway debut as the General in the original cast of “The Book of Mormon,” he’s been building his TV credits with appearances on ABC’s “How to Get Away With Murder” and NBC’s “This Is Us.”

But it’s “Atlanta” that has people taking notice of his talents. The FX comedy, created by and starring Donald Glover, follows two cousins and their friend as they navigate the city’s hip-hop scene to make better lives for themselves and their families. Henry plays up-and-coming rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles.


So your agent says there’s this show called “Atlanta”—

Well, it actually was my manager that found this script, and really thought, “Hey, you should go in for this.” And I read it, and I saw Alfred, and was like, “Oh, yeah, got to do this dude.” I went to college in Atlanta, and Atlanta had a huge part in my development of who I am. So once I read Alfred, I was like … OK, I think I know who this dude is. Because all of us have Alfreds in our lives. He's either your cousin, or your brother, or your lover or whatever, but we've all been Alfred at some point.

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Who is Alfred to you? And do you have a preference on whether you view him as Alfred or Paper Boi?

I do, actually ... I always call him Alfred. That's his name, that's who he is. And Paper Boi is just, you know — I don't want to say it's his alter ego. I don't even want to say that it's something that he sought to be. But that's kind of what fame is like, right?

With Alfred, he can't help how people view [him]. He's a big guy. He's kind of rough around the edges. He doesn't really smile that much. But when you do get that side of him, it's like, you're in. I really wanted there to be some levity to him. I wanted there to be some kind of relatability, because you don't really see a lot of Alfreds represented out there. You see the Paper Bois. The personas are easy to touch and see and digest.

All of us have Alfreds in our lives

— "Atlanta's" Brian Tyree Henry

Talk about the importance of having a show not only centered on three black men, but three black men struggling to make it. So often that struggle is framed as laziness.

There is no greater feeling than when I saw the artwork for this show, because I don't think, in my lifetime, I've ever seen a billboard with three black men, let alone in the front and not in the background. I've never trusted a show to really tell my story, or any story. I've never given a show that much power to be like, “Oh, they're gonna tell it.” Because then you get disappointed when you're like, “Oh, they went to the left.” But with this one, I just really had trust in every single part of it. I trusted my costars, I trusted my director, our producers. I never in a million years thought that it would be that way, that something like that could survive in this diaspora of television, or black television, or whatever. I never thought that I'd be a part of it either.

What was it like shooting the music video? It was the first thing you shot, right?

I was in my hotel room, all day, all night, learning the words, and trying to figure out how I was gonna move. The premise of the video is that I am a paper boy distributing bricks of cocaine like papers. As you do. And here we are in, like, this damn Dodge Charger. And I'm in a postal outfit, because my mixtape's name was “Postal.” And it's hot. Like, it's really, really hot. And I'm just throwing [the bricks], and, like, throwing it on people. And then these kids are coming out of the apartments, and they really think that I'm a rapper. They really think that this song is on. And at one point, I was like, “Hey, man, can we get the kids in the vi— actually, no, never mind. Like, no, no. Let's not, let's not get the kids in.”

Brian Tyree Henry speaks with The Times' Yvonne Villarreal about the freedom of both the city and the show "Atlanta."

yvonne.villarreal@latimes.com

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