“I was still on the team,” he says, “and I remember lying to my coach like, ‘I can’t make practice; I got to do test corrections.’ But I was really prepping for this audition. I turned a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air scene—you know the one where he’s sad about his dad? How come he don’t want me man?—into a monologue.”
He got the part. “That was a wake-up call for me,” Withers says. “The play was about police brutality, and it was really moving. Just for me to go up onstage—I’m not saying I was good, but sometimes I look back at the video of it and get emotional, because that kid doesn’t even know what might come of this. It was a rebirth, in a sense.” Not long after, Withers officially quit the football team.
That experience helped Withers tap further into creative interests that had long been simmering. “My brother was the first one to pick up a camera and make videos, so that made me want to do it too,” he remembers. Starting in middle school, the duo filmed a string of silly early Vines and YouTube videos together. By the time he was in college, Withers was regularly vlogging and filming pranks and sketches for a now-defunct YouTube channel called TyriqTV, which racked up 137,000 followers: “That was my film school,” he says.
In 2020, after graduating college in the midst of the pandemic, Withers moved to Atlanta to pursue an acting career (while starting an MBA program online, just in case). It took him a few months to find his footing, but eventually Withers signed with an agent and fell in with an acting coach he loved. He started recording self-tapes and auditioning for productions around town. And then, just as things were starting to fall into place, his whole world changed.
On April 30, 2021, Withers got a call from his mom that his brother Kionte had been killed in a car accident. “I’d experienced grief before, but not like this,” he says. “It was just like, Fuck, take me instead. My brother had a son. He was a beautiful father, so soft and sensitive to my nephew. And what am I doing?” Withers puts on a faux-cheery audition voice: “Hey, my name is Tyriq Withers. I’m six-foot-five, Atlanta, Georgia, local.”
Withers came within inches of quitting acting for good to move home and help raise his nephew. “My partner at the time asked me, ‘What would Kionte want?’ And I came to the conclusion that the best way to serve my family is to continue on this path of chasing my dreams,” he says. “That gave me purpose. I started looking for him in every script.”
Not long after, he landed his Atlanta role. Withers originally auditioned for what he thought was a bit part, only to discover upon getting the job that he’d be playing the episode’s lead. Written and directed by Donald Glover, the story follows a mixed-race, white-passing high schooler named Aaron, who’s forced to prove his Blackness before a jury in order to earn a college scholarship. (Sample question: “Name six things that mix with Hennessey.”) For Withers, who actually did attend Florida State on a scholarship awarded to first-generation African American students, the whole thing hit impossibly close to home.