Tyriq Withers grew up in Florida.
Jacksonville, specifically, which is technically the same state as Miami… the way New York is technically close to Maryland. It’s five hours away, give or take. But when Audi flew him in for the Grand Prix and he stepped off the plane, the humidity hit like home.
“I got off the plane, felt the humidity, and the water in my lungs,” he told me. “I love that.”
We are sitting in Audi’s hospitality suite in the Paddock Club at the Miami International Autodrome, which sits inside the Hard Rock Stadium complex in Miami Gardens. If you’ve never been to a F1 race, just know the stadium is barely recognizable once Formula One moves in. Temporary structures go up around a permanent venue, and every team carves out their own corner of it. This is Audi’s first season in F1, having taken over the former Sauber team, and their space reflects the energy of a brand that is still introducing itself to the sport. He’d also been with Audi in Las Vegas last November, for the night race, before the team had officially made its F1 debut.
The 27-year-old movie star (yes he’s earned that title), played football growing up and walked on at Florida State, where he was also chapter president of Alpha Phi Alpha. Somewhere between the field and the frat house, he decided he wanted to act. His big break came in 2022 when he booked a role on Donald Glover’s hit show Atlanta on FX (RIP to a masterpiece). In the episode “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga,” he played Aaron, a biracial high school student who has spent most of his life passing for white. When a Black millionaire shows up at his school and offers to pay every Black senior’s college tuition, Aaron is suddenly forced to reckon with the side of himself he’d been ignoring. After that came Tell Me Lies, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Him (also from a genius, Donald Peele), and now Reminders of Him. He has two more projects in some stage of production.
When I asked what he noticed working with both Glover and Peele, two directors who are deliberate about centering Blackness in their work, he said: “The black experience, it runs deep. There’s a river that flows through us all and wherever that river goes, we always know that feeling.”
He traces a lot of his pull toward heavy emotional material back to Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s film about Oscar Grant III. Seeing it sent him to audition for his first play in college. “In childhood, my emotions were always so suppressed,” he told me. “So now at 27, I’m understanding that people connect with emotion and that’s how I heal.” None of those spaces he came up in, football culture, fraternity culture, being a young Black man in general, are particularly invested in you knowing how to name what you’re feeling. Therapy helped, and so did the friends he surrounded himself with. They were the ones who pushed him to keep trying to articulate what he was actually feeling and wouldn’t accept anything less than honesty. But long before any of that, there were his grandmother and his aunt Diane. “They always reminded me that I have a light inside of me that shines, even if I don’t realize it,” he said.
Words like that stay with you, especially when you’re still working out who you are. Which for Withers, has always included navigating what it means to be biracial. “I’m stepping into who I am now and I’m grateful that I can keep pushing that conversation.” That Atlanta episode dealt with that tension honestly in a way that most scripts wouldn’t dare. It landed because it was specific, and Withers played it without hedging.
He didn’t develop that kind of emotional range by accident. Just a few days before this weekend, the anniversary came and went (April 30th). He felt it. “I’m living for two,” he said. What that looks like in practice, he explained, is carrying his brother into every room he walks into. But it’s also about something else, protecting the version of himself that existed before life got complicated. “I protect that inner child and what would he want? I think I live with a lot of love and grief. And so whenever I get to do what I love, there’s like a spirit of excitement that inner child coming out. And I think that’s how I connect with people.”
I asked him how this season of his life felt. He paused for a second, genuinely. “Life just has its ups and downs, but I’m grateful that God bestowed upon me this career.”
That’s what living for two looks like up close.
The post “I’m Living For Two”: Tyriq Withers On Growth, Identity, And Finding His Voice In Hollywood appeared first on Essence.
Author: Kimberly Wilson
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