Brian Tyree Henry Isn’t Hiding

The actor Brian Tyree Henry made his professional debut in 2007, as Tybalt, in a shimmering “Romeo and Juliet” for Shakespeare in the Park. More stage roles followed, then a nimble leap to television, in “Atlanta,” and a turn to film.

I saw it all, or nearly all (not “Godzilla vs. Kong”). So I can’t really explain how I spent so long in a nearly deserted hotel dining room sending increasingly anxious texts to Henry’s publicist, wondering where he was. As I texted, Henry was sitting at a table maybe 20 feet away, in glasses and a baseball cap. The cap had a large B on it.

Some comfort: This also happens to Julia Roberts, his co-star on a Sam Esmail film currently in production in Paris. “He’s kind of this quiet chameleon,” she told me later. “Sometimes I don’t put two and two together immediately. Then I’m like, oh, wait a minute: It’s Brian again.”

Henry, 42, an actor of extraordinary texture, vigor and grace, is tall and relatively broad. He looks, he knows, like a guy who used to play football. (Actually, he was a speech debate kid and a member of the marching band.) That he can disappear into roles, into a restaurant table, speaks to his gift, his craft. But for a man who has spent his life fighting to be seen, who struggles to feel that he belongs in the places he inhabits, it also brings a kind of pain.

“Even you didn’t know me with glasses on,” he said, once I’d shifted to his table. “There’s always just something that people are expecting. Then I come in and they’re just like, ‘Oh, well, that’s not what we want.’ And I’m like, well, this is who I am.”