In ‘Dope Thief,’ Brian Tyree Henry Goes on the Run of His Life

Craig was drawn to the imperfections of Dope Thief’s heroes. “I love stories about con men, I love stories about fraud, I love characters who think they’re on the periphery of something and they’re somehow morally impervious—as if they’re going to protect themselves from the real darkness of it,” he says. When he was asked about adapting the novel, he quickly got to work, changing the book’s setting to an ominous, immediate-post COVID moment. “Everybody’s a fuck-up on some level, from our heroes all the way to law enforcement,” Craig says. “It just seemed that like that COVID rollout, that era when nobody knew what was really happening, was the perfect era to really make a mess for everybody to live in.”

Following some stop-and-start projects, Craig also got to at last collaborate with Ridley Scott, who helmed the pilot alongside Oscar-winning cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mank), smack in between Napoleon and Gladiator II. “Erik came over to me and just went, ‘Ever seen Gone in 60 Seconds?’” Craig says with a laugh. “He was framing these shots as fast as he could possibly go, one after another—because Ridley is relentless. Ridley’s always, ‘Go, go, go, go. What are we waiting for?’” For Henry, Scott’s singular approach to filmmaking—moving at that rapid pace amid a massive multi-camera setup—proved inspiring. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, and all I look for is an actor to make me go, I never thought of that,’” Henry says. “How do you make a genius like Ridley Scott go, I never thought of that? But then your creative self gets to say, ‘I’m going to try.’”