The 10 Best Brian Tyree Henry Movies and TV Shows
On top of being one of the most inventive and adventurous shows of the last ten years, Donald Glover’s Atlanta has also helped to launch a few of our favourite actors’ careers.
After Glover himself (who was already famous from Community), LaKeith Stanfield was the next to break out; and while it might have taken a little longer for Brian Tyree Henry (who plays Miles, aka Paper Boi) to truly get noticed, the actor has put together a formidable body of work in the last decade and, despite some setbacks (cough cough, Eternals), looks to once again be on the verge of a move to that next level of Hollywood stardom.
In the next 12 months or so, Tyree Henry is set to appear in a Michael Gondry musical called Golden (a movie based on Pharrell’s early life), in Wagner Moura’s directorial debut Last Night at the Lobster, in Sam Esmail’s Panic Carefully (his follow-up to Leave the World Behind) and Gavin O’Connor’s Running, before finishing the Spider-Verse trilogy and, as was recently announced, appearing in the all-star cast of The Batman II (where he's rumoured to be playing Harvey Dent).
With all that to come, it seems like the right time to round up Brian Tyree Henry’s best movies and shows — which we’ve listed below in ascending order.
Watching all three seasons of Atlanta was like watching a creative artist growing in confidence in real time. There were hints of Donald Glover’s surrealist tastes as early as the first season, but getting to see the kind of big swings he started to take in later episodes was truly energising to watch.
The story in those early episodes followed Glover’s Earn, a scattered manager, as he attempted to channel the online success of his cousin Miles' — aka Paper Boi (Tyree Henry) — into a substantial music career. By the end, the show had fully shape-shifted into an expressionistic meditation of what it means to be a contemporary Black artist. It’s still the best thing that Tyree Henry has been involved with and he is consistently phenomenal in it.
Along with Widows, 2018 also saw the release of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk — in which Henry gave a performance that confirmed he was an actor to watch.
This was Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight, and while it can’t quite boast that Best Picture winning movie’s intensely emotional resonance, it’s a no less gorgeously realised and beautifully scored work and a fine adaptation of James Baldwin’s classic 1974 novel.
It might not be the most well-known film in Tyree Henry’s catalogue, but the actor’s performance in Causeway — a movie about a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence) who is forced to come home from the War in Afghanistan after suffering an injury, at which point she becomes friends with a local mechanic (Tyree Henry) — is one of the finest in his career.
It’s a wonderfully moving performance from the actor that’s really worth seeing if you like him in more sensitive roles. It was also Henry’s most acclaimed performance and even earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars.
With all the stellar names in the voice cast of Into the Spider-Verse and the strength of the characters they play, you can sometimes forget that it’s Tyree Henry providing the voice of officer Jefferson Davis — the concerned but loving dad of Miles Morales.
As this is probably the most-watched movie in the Tyree Henry canon, we’re guessing you’ve already seen it. If not, I can confirm that this movie and its sequel are two of the best comic book movies of the century. If they successfully land the next one, it’ll be a trilogy for the ages.
2018 was easily Tyree Henry’s breakout year thanks to his remarkable turns in If Beale Street Could Talk (more on that one shortly) and Steve McQueen’s Widows — an awesome and still underappreciated heist movie starring Viola Davis and Cynthia Erivo.
This was McQueen’s first movie after winning Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave — and watching it, you sense a filmmaker relishing the opportunity to stick his teeth into a classic genre after what must have been a psychologically draining experience. The movie follows the partners of three deceased bank robbers as they team up to pull off what was meant to be their husbands’ last job. Henry plays a local crime boss with ambitions to run for public office.
Written by Barry Jenkins, The Fire Inside is an indie Spirit Award-nominated movie that follows the early career years of the real-life boxing star Claressa Shields as she trains to become the first American woman to win an Olympic gold in the sport.
You can probably guess that Tyree Henry plays her initially skeptical and soon supportive coach Jason Crutchfield. If you’re a fan of Tyree Henry and enjoy a good underdog sports story (think movies like Million Dollar Baby), you’re probably gonna vibe with it.
Tyree Henry’s most recent role came opposite Wagner Moura in the TV miniseries Dope Thief — in which the Oscar nominated actors co-star as a pair of con men who pretend to be drug enforcement agents but end up uncovering a vast conspiracy.
This was the show that brought Moura (who was excellent in The Secret Agent last year) and Tyree Henry together for the first time, and if you need some evidence of how good their chemistry is just consider once again that Moura has cast him to star in his directorial debut.
Alongside his great on-screen appearances, Tyree Henry has also enjoyed a remarkable career as a voice actor already , with parts in some of the best animated movies of the last few years. One of his most prominent came in 2024 when he voiced D-16 (aka Megatron) in the excellent Transformers One — a real gem of a movie that explored the origin story of Megatron’s rivalry with Optimus Prime.
The movie is the second feature of director Josh Cooley, who helmed Toy Story 4 and who brings plenty of that immaculate Pixar-coded storytelling to bear in this compelling tale of two friends who end up as sworn enemies.
In 2022, Henry got to really show his action chops in David Leitch's Bullet Train, a Brad Pitt-starring beat-em-up that borrowed the highly choreographed action of a John Wick movie and put it on a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto.
If you like inventive action movies that take place in confined locations, like The Raid, you’ll probably have a great time with this one — not least Tyree Henry’s fight scene with Pitt in the train's quiet carriage.
This one probably doesn’t need a big introduction, but you might not have noticed that one of Tyree Henry’s first on-screen parts in a major Hollywood movie came in Todd Philips’ Joker — in which he plays a clerk in Arkham Asylum during a brief but memorable scene early on.
The movie saw Joaquin Phoenix win Best Actor at the Oscars for a typically dedicated performance as Batman’s bête noire. It also made an enormous amount of money at the box-office — more than enough to cement its place as one of the most respected and influential movies in the genre. Whether Tyree Henry’s role in The Batman II will be connected in any way seems at best unlikely.
