Brian Tyree Henry Becoming a Movie Star

GQ – "Brian Tyree Henry Is Learning How to Be a Movie Star"

"He's been, basically, marooned on film sets for the past year. “Living with a lot of personalities,” as he puts it."

...

"Henry is often confronted with the suggestion that he has lucked into his current position in Hollywood. “I get irritated, 'cause people are like, ‘Oh, you're having a moment.’ I'm like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ ” After graduate school, when Henry moved to New York to do theater, “I was pretty much homeless,” he says. For a while, he couch surfed and survived on food stamps. “But I'm glad I experienced that to be where I am now,” Henry says. “I'm so glad that this shit didn't start happening for me until now, with the TV and film aspect. I'm so glad it wasn't back when I was real tiny and I was, like, a 33 waist and I was in the gym every day, and the agents I had at the time were like, ‘You're still too fat.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ And you believe that stuff, though. I was berated all the time, like: ‘You're too big.’ I was so tiny, man. I have never been more comfortable in the skin I am in now. Because all my life, I was so body dysmorphic. I had all these people telling me how I look. Like: ‘You're not a leading man. You're not small enough.’ ”

But then Henry got The Book of Mormon. “I remember being on Book of Mormon and just sitting there and being like, The fuck? I'm making money. I'm eating whatever the fuck I want. Like, What's that? Pommes frites? Yeah, man. Give me that. I don't know what that cheese is. Give me that cheese. I love myself, man. I love myself. I didn't give a fuck.” He fired his agents, got new ones. “It was so nice to be at some point in my life where I could love every inch of my fucking body, man. And as soon as I did that, I got Atlanta. I got everything. I got everything as soon as I stopped giving a fuck.”"