Brian Tyree Henry on Widows, Atlanta, If Beale Street Could Talk, and His Life and Legacy

Brian Tyree Henry didn’t have many playmates as a kid in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His parents were the only adults on his block who seemed to work (“We’re one paycheck from being broke or homeless,” his dad used to say). Three of his four half-sisters were teenagers when Henry was born; the neighbors peering at the three-bedroom, horseshoe-shaped house were all retired. Henry learned to read at 3, and soon, during summers, indulged his habit, burrowing into the library stacks for eight hours each day. “I spent a lot of time in the Garfield section,” he told Vogue one mid-October day at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel. He was in town for the Chicago International Film Festival screening of his new film, Widows, along with director Steve McQueen, cowriter Gillian Flynn, and fellow castmates Viola Davis, Liam Neeson, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo. The 6-foot-2 Henry wore black boots, fedora, and jeans when we met, plus a white button-down accented with black shoulders, sleeves, collar, and pockets. Nickel-size, silver hoop earrings gleamed from either side of his jaw scruff; additional accessories included eyeglasses, multiple necklaces and bracelets made from wooden beads, and a black Champion fanny pack slung over his arm. “As I advanced, I started reading, like, the Torah,” he said, while back home, Nick Jr. classics Maya the Honey Bee, Eureeka’s Castle, and The Adventures of David the Gnome “raised me in the best possible way.” Books and television led him to believe there was a huge world that “my family was hiding from me.” He quickly realized, he says, that fantasy was “cheaper than therapy!”

A good storyteller with an uncensored upbringing who could talk himself out of “trouble trouble” and “join in the [adult] conversations as if I knew exactly what they were talking about, like taxes” sounds primed for a professional acting career, even despite a lack of black characters he could relate to on-screen. An early taste confirmed it: At his all-black public high school, he recalls “foaming at the mouth” while reciting a monologue from Lord Capulet to fulfill a Shakespeare assignment. Then came the ’90s, an era he described as “incredibly revolutionary for me,” bringing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air into his living room, as well as In Living Color, Living Single, Moesha, and Russell Simmons Presents Def Comedy Jam, and the realization that people who looked like him could do this thing too.