After the pilot, Murai said, Henry's character quickly became “the emotional core of the show.” Atlanta is a remarkably diffuse, hazy, meandering series: Its storytelling logic is the kind that comes from dreams or drugs or both. Henry's Alfred is the show's one fixed point: Atlanta's watchful, exhausted, constant pulse. “We often talk about in the edit room that the whole show is hinged around Alfred reaction shots,” Murai said. “It's always absurd situations, and you're always looking to Brian to let us know how to feel about it.”

By the time the Atlanta cast re-united to shoot the show's second season, nearly everyone involved found themselves reckoning with new levels of fame, scrutiny, and temptation, and so in many ways the show became about that—Robinson and Murai and Glover making allegorical, often stand-alone episodes about the trials of success. One of those episodes, “Woods,” featured Henry, and had the type of deceptively simple plot that is the hallmark of the show: Alfred goes for a walk. He's recognized by a group of kids who try to rob him at gunpoint. He escapes to the woods, where he becomes lost and encounters a mysterious man who threatens him with a box cutter. Eventually, Alfred emerges, badly shaken but intact. Finally he enters a gas station, and takes a selfie with a fan.

At the beginning of the episode, there's a brief allusion to the fact that it's the anniversary of Alfred's mother's death. This had a particularly specific resonance for Henry, who two and a half years ago lost his mother in a traffic accident. May 12, 2016: four days after Mother's Day and the day after the wrap party for the first season of Atlanta. Robinson, who wrote the script, told me she didn't exactly intend “Woods” to be about Henry's own experience with loss. “But by the same token,” she said, “I knew he could take care of it and make it personal.” Henry read the script only shortly before shooting the episode. He didn't really ask questions: “I was like, ‘I'm not gonna say much.’ ” Murai told me that the episode was, essentially, “a structureless experiment. And part of that was knowing that we were touching on something that was really real.”

“I had all these people telling me how I look. Like: ‘You’re not a leading man. You’re not small enough.’ I have never been more comfortable in the skin I am in now.”

The experiment worked: “Woods,” and the ambient terror and emotional ambiguity it conjured up, was an example of everything Atlanta did well, right down to the last shot, in which Alfred smiles into a stranger's camera, his real self somewhere else, far away. When the episode aired in April, it was hailed as a breakthrough, in large part for Henry's panicked and intensely detailed performance. This summer, Henry was nominated for an Emmy. As part of the campaign that FX mounted for the show, Henry found himself in the uncomfortable situation of explaining, over and over again, his feelings about the episode, which for him remain inextricable from his feelings about the loss of his mother.

“What kills me is everyone's like, ‘How do you feel about this Emmy nomination?’ ” Henry says to me. “My mother's dead. Every time I close my eyes, I see my hand on her casket. Every time I close my eyes, I hear my necklace bang on her casket. That's the last time I saw her. That's the only thing that gets me out of bed, and it's sometimes the thing that keeps me in it. So being busy helps, but y'all don't understand. If she's not here to see it, I don't really get a chance to rejoice in it. You know what I mean? I've buried a person every year for three years. I lost my best friend to cancer; then I lost my other best friend the next year to lupus. And I lost my mom to a fucking car accident. She wasn't even sick. She died in the most awful fucking way. So it's like… I haven't had a chance to even think about that. But I still have to survive. I like to believe that all these blessings are them. But it would be really nice to look to my left and see my mother sitting there when they call my name. You know? And I'm being real fucking real with you. It's hard to do this stuff. It's just like she died yesterday, man. I haven't even looked at a photograph of my mom since she died. I can't look at her. And yet people are still celebrating and lauding this thing that I did about my mom. When, at the end of the day, I can't really rejoice in what I did, because I'm still in pain.”

Shirt, $1,280, by Gucci

Here is probably as good a place as any to mention the dick tour. Those words may sound funny to you, but I assure you they're not. Or they are, but only in the way that tragedy—real tragedy, the kind that opens up a chasm that you will spend the rest of your life climbing out of—is funny, because real tragedy has a way of summoning up every other feeling in the world to match its intensity: grief, despair, laughter, love.