Small-time hoodlums pose as DEA agents to rip off drug dealers until it all goes horribly wrong in this gritty crime drama from producer Ridley Scott
After Dope Thief star and executive producer Brian Tyree Henry had finished his first scene with co-star Wagner Moura, he walked over to series creator Peter Craig and gave him a big hug. “He was so happy,” says Craig. “They knew immediately how good they were going to be together. They knew how well they were going to bond — and that is part of what made our show, because the chemistry between those guys is so incredible.”
It wasn’t always a given that Henry and Moura (Narcos) were going to lead the series adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s crime novel, produced by Ridley Scott (who also directed the pilot). When the script came Henry’s way, he had turned it down without even reading it. “I was tired,” says Henry, who had followed his run on Atlanta with a role on Class of ’09 and was not looking for another TV project. “TV takes a lot. My amazing producing partner, who knows me in and out, slid this script to me and was like, ‘You should think about this.’ And I was like, ‘Nope.’ But then I started reading it and I was like, ‘Oh man.’ I really couldn’t stop because Ray was loud on the page. Ray was screaming at me.”
On the surface of it, Ray and longtime buddy Manny (Moura) are two down-on-their-luck Philadelphia natives, who pose as DEA agents to rob drug dealers of their narcotics and money. “These guys are fiddling with the edges of the drug world that they’ve lived their whole lives in,” says Craig. “They feel entitled to steal from it because it has hurt their lives. They justify it by thinking they’re not hurting anybody else.” But the friends since their time in a juvenile detention in their teens are hardly the hardened criminals usually served up by crime series. “I’ve never seen characters as vulnerable as these ones,” says Moura. “They’re a Black and a Latino man involved in the cycle of violence that many people cannot get out of. Some of them want to be there. I played Pablo Escobar — he wanted to be there. Manny and Ray, they were just thrown into that situation. They were told that that was the value that they had.”
Early on, the series takes a dangerous turn when Ray and Manny rob the wrong people and are forced to go on the run within the confines of Philadelphia. Unable to escape the city or each other, the heightened situation highlights the unhealthy relationship the two have built as friends. “I see it as a very tragic love story,” says Craig. “When you’re trauma-bonded, that’s absolutely true love, but you can’t really escape the trauma. And they don’t have that much in common outside of the terrible events that bonded them early on in their lives. And they’re so loyal to each other, but how do you honour that loyalty and still try to escape that pattern of trauma that you’re in?”
Although the series maintains a thriller element, as the real bad guys close in on the not-super-bad-but-morally-misguided guys, what Craig feels is the meat of the show are the themes they get to explore through the pressure-cooker scenario. “In a way I was doing kind of a redemptive reverse crime story arc,” he says. “They would be able to get away more easily if they had any ruthlessness in them. But they don’t. They keep coming up against some kind of residual moral belief system and the people that they really love, want to protect and don’t think they can abandon. The biggest obstacle that they face isn’ t even really the villains. It’s their inability to be villains themselves.”
One of the themes Henry wanted to dig his teeth into, from the moment he read Craig’s script, was his character’s struggle to find his footing in a social system that only allows for theoretical redemption. “You’re trying to figure out who you are now, as this free man, and also what it feels like to feel trapped, because this city has told them, ‘We’re going to put you in a system that’s going to keep you right here, and you can’t be anything more than that,’” he explains. It’s an exploration Henry feels he could never have executed without the support of the right onscreen partner. “His first day on set, Wagner pulled into this green room, and we looked at each other and he said, ‘My name is Wagner Moura. I am this old. I’m coming from here. I’m scared.’ And then I introduced myself to him, and it was like, ‘I got you. No matter what it is, I’ve got you. We’re going to go through this together.’ And it felt immediately like that’s who Ray and Manny were. That’s how we wanted to portray them.”
Dope Thief, streaming Friday, March 28 on Apple TV+