Dwight Henry: The Baker Who Became a Movie Star

The Dwight Henry Story

Dwight Henry was a baker. That's what he was, that's what he wanted to be, and that's what he was doing when a movie showed up at his bakery and changed his life. Henry ran Buttermilk Drop Bakery and Cafe in the Tremé neighborhood, making the kind of pastries that New Orleanians drive across town for, when the filmmakers behind Beasts of the Southern Wild walked in and saw something in him that the rest of the world was about to see too.

Henry was born in New Orleans and had spent his career building his bakery into a neighborhood institution. The Buttermilk Drop—named for the signature pastry, a pillowy, slightly sweet drop donut—was the kind of place that anchors a community. It was where people came for breakfast before work, where neighbors caught up on gossip, where the rhythm of the Tremé moved through a small room filled with the smell of frying dough.

When Benh Zeitlin was casting Beasts of the Southern Wild, his 2012 film about a young girl named Hushpuppy surviving in a disappearing bayou community south of New Orleans, he used non-professional actors. He found Quvenzhané Wallis, who became the youngest Best Actress nominee in Oscar history. And he found Dwight Henry, the baker from Tremé, who would play Hushpuppy's fierce, dying father Wink.

Henry's performance was revelatory. He played Wink with a raw, volcanic intensity that professional actors spend their entire careers trying to achieve. There was nothing polished about it—it was pure emotion, the performance of a man who understood the character's desperation and love because he understood the world the character came from. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for four Academy Awards.

After Beasts, Hollywood came calling. Henry appeared in 12 Years a Slave, Midnight Special, and other films, building an acting career that he never sought and never quite believed was real. Through it all, he kept the bakery open. Because Dwight Henry was a baker first, an actor second, and a New Orleans man always.

His story is pure New Orleans: a man doing his work, making his pastries, living his life in the Tremé, when art walks through the door and recognizes what's been there all along. The city is full of people like Dwight Henry—people with extraordinary gifts that they exercise quietly, daily, without any expectation that the wider world will ever notice. Sometimes the world does notice. And when it does, it's always surprised. New Orleans never is.