Henry’s father died during filmmaking. Henry came back to set to shoot an unusually taxing scene in which an infected gunshot wound leaves Ray delirious. Looking up from the floor, he was surrounded by pictures of himself as a child in his father’s house. (He had lent them to the set decorating team.) He felt overwhelmed, almost out of his own body. But then the director would yell action, and he would lose himself in the character. The tears came, and he let them come.
Henry doesn’t entirely understand what he does, the deep wells that he draws from for each role. Wagner Moura, his co-star on “Dope Thief,” observed some of this process.
“He’s a very spiritual person; he pays attention to signs and coincidences,” Moura said on a video call. “He’s very connected to his inner self. It does seem very intense.” But it was also a pleasure, Moura noted. Henry would drop that intensity the moment a scene ended and revert to his gentler self.
Henry echoed this: “I want people to know that this is who I am, to make sure people can really get glimpses of who Brian is.”
Henry is still trying to sort out how to be comfortable with who he is — even now, when he finds himself, say, on a movie set alongside a big star like Julia Roberts, he will catch himself wondering if he deserves to be there. He doesn’t speak of romantic relationships, and he suggested that he has a hard time maintaining them, in part because of his relationship with himself.
“It is lonely,” he said. “But I’m still figuring it out.”
In the meantime, there will be more roles to play, more men to redeem, more reasons to prove to himself that he belongs in the life he has made, to broaden out that life.
“I just want to stretch people’s imagination of where I can be and what I can do,” he said. “I really want you to just pull back on the rubber band, the elasticity of your mind to be like, Oh, yeah, we want him to exist there, too.”
