Brian Tyree Henry was born on March 31, 1982, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and raised partly in Washington, D.C. He studied business at Morehouse College before turning to acting, earned a master’s degree at the Yale School of Drama, and began his career on stage, including a 2007 appearance as Tybalt in Shakespeare in the Park’s Romeo and Juliet.
On Broadway, he joined the original cast of The Book of Mormon in 2011 and earned a Tony nomination for playing William, a security guard, in the 2018 revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero. Television audiences came to know him as Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles in Atlanta, the FX comedy-drama created by Donald Glover, which ran from 2016 to 2022 and brought him an Emmy nomination.
His film breakthrough came in 2018, with roles in Steve McQueen’s heist drama Widows and Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Bigger productions followed: he played Phastos in Marvel’s Eternals, appeared in the Godzilla and Kong films and Bullet Train, and voiced roles in the Spider-Verse films and Transformers One. In Causeway, he played a mechanic recovering from injury opposite Jennifer Lawrence, a performance that brought him an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor at the 2023 ceremony.
Henry played Ray and served as an executive producer of Dope Thief, an Apple TV+ limited series created by Peter Craig from Dennis Tafoya’s novel, which premiered in March 2025. In a 2025 Television Academy interview, he described gradually accepting that he belonged in acting after years of self-doubt. He also spoke about the care he brings to portraying Black men, connecting his ambitions as a performer with the people he wants audiences to understand.
He also voiced Jefferson Davis, Spider-Man’s father, in the animated Spider-Verse films.
