The Desperation of Dope Thief: An Interview With Creator Peter Craig

Ray and Manny are tight. Brothers, just not by blood. They’ve hung together since juvie, through addictions and various scores. Their latest is posing as DEA agents. Slip on official-looking windbreakers, hit a house with some kid watchdogging from the stoop, flash a gun and some attitude, then shake down the street dealers inside.  

It’s not like they’ll call the cops. “If you’re good, they don’t remember your face,” says Ray, played by Brian Tyree Henry. “We only take from the weak ones. … It’s like when there’s too many deer. You get the hunters to kill ’em.” 

The scheme goes horribly wrong in Dope Thief, a limited series streaming on Apple TV+. Adapted from Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel, the gritty thriller holds an 87 percent “Fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com, with critics praising its suspense, action, “pulpy vitality” and superb acting from Oscar-nominee Henry (The Fire Inside) and Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) as Manny. 

For series creator and writer Peter Craig (Top Gun: Maverick, 2022’s The Batman), the key to this propulsive drama was its characters. While Ray and Manny don’t disguise themselves like the Caped Crusader, they’re cloaked all the same.  

“It’s clear there’s something they can’t face about themselves. I mean, whenever you’re really working so hard to deceive, you’re basically always deceiving yourself in the end,” he said. “The whole thing is about how you sort of disarm your judgment process when you’re in and out of recovery all the time. … You’re really meant to watch people making really bad decisions and attempting to learn from them the whole way through.” 

With several successful adaptations behind him, Craig discussed with Script his decisions in shaping Dope Thief and segueing from page to screen.  

“We were all committed to making it pop” 

Just like in the novel, the drama in Dope Thief centers on what happens when Ray and Manny target the wrong house. An acquaintance fresh out of prison tells them about an address in the country outside their Philadelphia stomping grounds. It’s tempting because of the sizeable payday, with Theresa (Kate Mulgrew, Star Trek: Prodigy), the woman who raised Ray like a son, facing exorbitant medical costs. 

But what looks like a meth-cooking house turns out to be part of a drug-trafficking corridor along the Eastern Seaboard. Soon, the feds, including a wounded agent (Marin Ireland, Justified: City Primeval), and the operation’s shadowy kingpin are on their trail, threatening everyone they love, including Theresa and Manny’s girlfriend, Sherry (Liz Caribel Sierra, Blink Twice). 

Henry and Moura are “true artists,” he said. “There was a restaurant called The Love in Philadelphia where we used to meet every Friday night and go over everything. All three of us were just committed to fusing our heads together on who all these people were. Brian, Wagner, and I all really understood the tragic love story aspect of all this, and we were all committed to making it pop.” 

While themes of family and loyalty are the heart of Dope Thief, viewers might be surprised (and impressed) to learn that the investigators, Ray’s lawyer (Nesta Cooper, Fire Country), and several other characters and developments aren’t in the book. The novel’s second half is more introspective, which Craig thought the series’ performances and filmmaking conveyed better. 

Tafoya understood completely. “We just said, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re really going to recognize a lot of the book in the pilot, and some of it in the second episode, and then less every single episode. And he said, ‘Fine, as long as you feel like you’re being true to the feelings and the ideas in the book. He’s a really generous, lovely guy,” Craig said. 

Adaptation as a “playing field” 

Craig started his writing career as a crime novelist. He’s co-written the screenplays for 2010’s The Town (based on Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2 (based on Suzanne Collins’ bestseller). He’s even adapted one of his own books, Blood Father, which became a 2016 film co-starring Mel Gibson and Diego Luna. That production started to run out of money before they filmed the ending, so he rewrote it to fit “what we had cash to shoot,” he said. 

“When I started in this business, I thought an adaptation was really different from an original, and it really isn’t. It’s strange. You get a playing field with an adaptation. There are certain areas that are out of bounds, but you still have infinite possibilities within that playing field. So, if I can connect to the characters and the idea of what it is—if I know what that playing field is, if I know what that author feels about those people, and I can relate to it—then I know I can adapt it.” 

Sometimes a book is an inspiration, sometimes a bible, and sometimes an author or the studio wants to be so faithful, it feels like a transcription of the book. He remembered meeting often with Collins when working on The Hunger Games: Mockingjay to explain deviations from the source material.  

“You have to remember it’s a different medium. A reader of a book will go with you because they’re so in the mind of the lead character,” he said. “But when you’re watching it visually, it’s always third person. You impose all sorts of prejudices and ideas on scenes, and you have to think more about where people are from one moment to the next.” 

For other writers considering adaptations, he suggested homing in on what makes the characters the most relatable to them, which will generate the emotions an audience will follow.  

“The most fun in these stories for me is to think of everybody as being completely human, and not just try to think completely from their point of view but experience their desperation,” he added. “Everybody’s desperation has their own texture. It’s its own motivating kind of thing, its own color. And I think if you can feel it for everyone, then you can usually write something that’s pretty three-dimensional.”