Stars Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura join showrunner Peter Craig to chat with Steve Newall about their gripping new series Dope Thief.
A new crime drama series follows a couple of lifelong friends and opportunists—Ray (Brian Tyree Henry – Atlanta and Causeway) and Manny (Wagner Moura – Narcos and Civil War)—as they get more than they bargained for in what initially seems like a victimless crime.
As the COVID pandemic bites, the pair sees opportunity on the emptying streets of Philly, posing as DEA agents and raiding drug houses for their cash and stash. It seems like the perfect scam, with relatively modest risk and reward—at least until they hit the wrong place and set off an explosive chain of consequences.
“I just thought that was such a clean premise,” showrunner Peter Craig says of the 2009 novel by Dennis Tafoya that he’s adapted for the screen here. “I just love the idea that these con men think they can do it all with a badge.”
As Craig tells me, he loved the moral apparatus that these two men built for themselves—to think they weren’t as bad as everything around them, and that they were justified in doing this because their neighbourhoods had gone to hell.
“I really liked guys that were not suited to this,” Craig says. “I wanted to write a story about people that, you know, they didn’t learn how to be killers. They didn’t learn how to be mobsters or dons.” It was exactly that sentiment Craig passed on to Moura—that this was really the opposite of Pablo Escobar (who Moura brought to life in Narcos) that he was playing. “It was the absolute other end of the drug trade that he was depicting, and that was a unique way into this story.”
As far as ways into the story go, Dope Thief’s opening episode is a doozy. It establishes the strong relationship between its main characters, and the rhythm of unforced humour that longtime friends share. And it rapidly piles on some superbly-staged tension—unsurprising, given that Sir Ridley Scott (also an exec producer) was the director of episode one.
“It was thrilling,” Craig says of working with the master. “I learned so much, not just for the rest of the show, but for the rest of my career.” Craig credits the now-87-year-old filmmaking legend as being pivotal in establishing a tone for the whole show—the “eternal dusk” it’s set in, the locations used.
“That’s a spatial genius at play,” Craig enthuses. “And just to tell you a crazy story, he could go in a room for 30 seconds, leave that room, and two days later, you could tell him to sketch that room, and he would sketch it with exact proportions perfectly everywhere. It was like getting to work with a really masterful painter.”
Crucial to the show is bringing the city of Philadelphia to life on screen. So much of the predicament Ray and Manny find themselves in involves their relationship with their hometown (and their inability to leave it).
It’s a connection with place that Craig sees in his own past. “I connect with people that are really formed by the places that they’re from,” he says “You know, people that are so indigenous that they don’t really know how to leave.” Even when the shit starts hitting the fan—maybe especially when the shit starts hitting the fan—Ray and Manny seems more frightened of everything outside of Philly than they are of what’s coming for them.
“They have to retreat into what they know the best, and that’s home,” Craig says. “I like writing about people’s homes. I think just walking into anybody’s house—your house, or my house—you’d know a lot just from what it is when you walk in there. It’s the same with cities. Cities are just homes for bigger groups of people, and the way they treat their streets and their neighbourhoods. It just tells me everything.”
So much of Dope Thief relies on the chemistry between its leads, and I asked Craig about how he’d fostered this. “I would love to claim credit and say I did, but I didn’t” he says. “I just had to introduce them to each other.” Craig describes Wagner Moura as a really loving, open guy, and Brian Tyree Henry as brilliant and so loyal (“as soon as he believes in somebody, they’re friends for good, like these guys are friends for life”).
As Moura explains, he came on board for Dope Thief at the very last moment. “I spoke with Ridley Scott on on Friday, and then I spoke with Brian on Friday night, and then on Monday I was shooting the series.” Not what you’d think would be the best preparation between cast mates, especially when playing best friends, but Moura recalls feeling a very interesting connection down the phone, one that he cemented minutes before his first scene with Henry (incidentally, the first scene we see as viewers).
“When we were about to go to the set, I was like ‘Brian, I need five minutes with you,'” he tells me. “So we went to this green room. We locked the door, we looked at each other, I looked at him, and I said, ‘my name is Wagner Moura. I’m Brazilian. I’m forty-six years old. I have three sons. This is scary for me, because you know, I just got the script, and I’m here.’”
“He looked at me, and he said, ‘my name is Brian’, and he started to talk about himself. And in that moment, there was a such a strong connection between us.” Describing Henry as “one of the greatest actors I have ever worked with,” Moura thinks that there are some things that you cannot explain—and his relationship with his co-star is one of these.
“I was very vocal about what I knew I needed,” says Henry, “this is a person that I was going to be across from and going through these crazy highs and lows with in this show.” To get the right actor opposite him was crucial, with Henry characterising Dope Thief as “truly a love story”.
“There are so many moments that aren’t written on the page of proximity to each other and what that kindness and that care looks like. That really had to come from me and Wagner.” Henry shares. “I remember there were moments where I was like, ‘are you okay if I put my hand on your shoulder? Are you okay if I lay my head on you? Are you okay if we’re this close man, is it cool?’”
“Because I feel like these two have been in situations most of their life, where they have been restricted in that kind of relationship. They’ve been in prison cells. You see them get on the [prison] bus and they sit next to each other. Manny draws on Ray’s cast.”
“That’s a vulnerability,” Henry says. “That’s truly a vulnerability that we don’t get to see between two men, especially black and brown men. You hear drugs, you hear that one’s black, one’s Latino. And you just automatically think it’s some machismo, macho shit.” No, asserts Henry, this is truly about tenderness and care for one another. It’s why he loves how most of their scenes are next to each other in a car, or a bus, or in a closet.
“We have no problem in each other’s space, because for the longest time, I think it’s the closest relationship either one of us as characters have ever had.”
Henry knew that in order for that to translate on screen, he and Moura had to find that kind of closeness. “We didn’t have to find search far. It happened so quick, man—if you ever get a chance to stare into this man’s eyes, I’m telling you right now, you do it. It will forever change you.”
The friendship at the show’s core was forged in difficult circumstances—as we learn, Ray and Manny found each other in the prison system. As Henry puts it, “they literally have been in and out and in and out of this system that has told them that they don’t deserve anything. And so the system has now pushed them into this place of manhood all of a sudden, where they have to figure out how to survive.”
“It was part of Philly,” Peter Craig says of the prison system, a deep part of both the city and his characters. “It was a small and even smaller, more claustrophobic aspect that they would go into. Going to prison’s brutal, because everything is blown apart, and then you come out and you try to rebuild again.”
“That really made me understand these guys,” Craig continues. “Ray, particularly, is really an intelligent guy. How is he in his 30s and hasn’t locked into anything else? Well, it’s because he’s had to lose everything multiple times in his life and then come back and rebuild. And this is just one of those shortcuts that he’s coming back and trying to take. And, you know, shortcuts in crime stories never go well…”
The COVID pandemic is part of the show’s backdrop, but isn’t just window dressing or a time stamp. It’s essential to the bigger opportunity that presents itself (or bigger trap that presents itself) to Ray and Manny—drastically raising the stakes of what they stumble into. “There was so much of a breakdown of all of these agreements that we had with each other,” Craig reflects: “From everything like whether or not we were going to go back to work, to who was wearing masks and who wasn’t wearing masks, to in my country, particularly the vaccine and some of the information and misinformation about that.”
Everything was really breaking into these tribes more visibly than it ever happened before, Craig says. “It’s always been that way, a little bit in America. But the lines were really being drawn pretty clearly in COVID, and people were particularly mistrusting of each other, in a way that works very well for a con story, and in a way that I think we’re still seeing, obviously the ramifications of right now that all of these agreements are just starting to break down.”
One such agreement is addressed onscreen, and while it wasn’t taken from Dennis Tafoya’s novel, Craig wanted to centre everything around it: “Sun Pham, the Vietnamese mobster character who’s the handler, says, ‘money’s just an agreement’”. And now we’re starting to think about this all the time with Bitcoin and with what’s going to happen with currencies, like we’re just agreeing to the value of this paper we’re even holding, and this paper that these guys steal.”
Behind everything, Craig had this feeling that norms are breaking down, roles are breaking down, agreements are breaking down. “I love that Brian, at one point says, ‘you know, we have to be really professional, because people don’t respect that badge the way they used to’. There’s irony in it, but it’s also true.”
INTERVIEW EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY
