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At the French Open this year, Tyriq Withers wasn’t just focused on the gameplay.
The 6-foot-5 former athlete and fashion lover rooted for his friend Coco Gauff, and got glowing press coverage for the Louis Vuitton jacket
and Patek Philippe Lady Ellipse he sported at Roland Garros. But Withers had a secret mission too: monitoring the ball boys.
“The way they hold the ball, the way they stand, the way they take a knee,” Withers says. It was all of interest, because after a rapid rise as a movie actor, Withers’ next role is playing the lead in romantic comedy “Love Love” opposite “1883” standout Isabel May. She’s a tennis star competing in the U.S. Open; he’s the ball boy who catches her eye.
And while those who serve that role at the French Open are exclusively children and teens, Withers was still scoping out their moves. Accustomed to training from his days as a football player at Florida State, Withers needed to absorb all he could: The tournament was in late May and early June, and “Love Love” will begin shooting in Queens — to coincide with the real U.S. Open — this month.
Withers, 28, has lately been seizing every opportunity in his path, but the Amazon MGM Studios rom-com represents a chance to show a lighter side. Since his breakout role in a 2022 stand-alone episode of “Atlanta” — one written and directed by its creator, Donald Glover — Withers has had a key supporting part in 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” revival and led two films, the 2025 Jordan Peele-produced horror movie “Him” and the Colleen Hoover adaptation “Reminders of Him” earlier this year.
Thankfully for all involved, “Reminders of Him,” which did solid business in the spring, was not a reminder of “Him,” which flopped last fall. In each, though, Withers played a riff on masculinity, and while the films took different approaches to the subject, both cast him as a football star with a complicated relationship to the sport. In the former, he’s enduring sinister trials in an attempt to rise in the pros; in the latter, the character’s career is over, leaving him free to enter into a tentative romance. When he began acting, Withers dove into it, trying to find a self that he’d pushed down as an elite athlete, and in every role he takes, he doesn’t just edge nearer to becoming a household name — he uncovers a new aspect of his own story, one colored by both grief and curiosity.
In “Reminders of Him,” for instance, his character is helping parent the child of his late best friend; Withers lost his older brother, Kionte, after a car crash in 2021, and remains involved in Kionte’s son’s life. He struggles to look at his nephew without feeling survivor’s guilt. “It’s painful, because I’m blessed to have all these opportunities, but I don’t feel happy like you thought you would,” he says. “It’s a lonely experience; it’s hard to communicate when you get off the phone with your team, and there’s this silence.” Recalling booking the part on “Atlanta,” Withers adds, “You hear the words over the phone, and you know what it’s supposed to feel like, but it would never feel as you’d think it would. All I could think about was my relationship with my brother, and how much better it would be to call him on the phone and say, ‘Wow, we’re going on vacation!’”
Perhaps to drown out that silence, Withers throws himself into his work: The game-day mentality, and the ambivalence about the sport, came easily. Withers had been a walk-on wide receiver at Florida State in 2016 and 2017. Though he quit the sport before graduation, he retained a football player’s bulk, which he’s had to shed for his role in “Love Love.” “The last time I weighed this, it was in high school,” he says. “I think this one’s got to be boyish and flexible.” Withers knows that changing his frame isn’t just about the look: “My joints, from years of sports — I’m getting on the older side of things, so it’s a lot of holistic healing, stretching.” To build his focus, Withers has been practicing meditation: “My ADHD is, like, crazy.”
In conversation with Withers, one suspects that the meditation has taken effect. Our interview takes place in a tiny storage room at a photo studio — practically a closet, but Withers, dressed in a sweatsuit, gym socks and YSL loafers, has folded his sizable body into a petite office chair and seems not to notice the tight quarters. This is true even as, while moving his hands above his head to emphasize a point or to stretch out, he jostles clothes hangers suspended behind him without reacting. He seems at ease taking up space.
That trait may serve him well in “Love Love,” his first project as an executive producer — a quick assertion of power for a young actor, given that it’s been only four years since “Atlanta” put him on the map. Withers speaks with enthusiasm about the project, but contests the rom-com designation; for him, there’s a little more meat to it. “I’d challenge that it’s a romantic dramedy,” he says, “because there’s an element of real-life human connection and vulnerability. It’s going to give you ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Notting Hill.’”
Those are lofty comparisons — and Withers, abashed that he’s cited two all-time classics to describe a movie that hasn’t yet shot, makes clear he intends the comparison only in terms of tone, not quality. While Withers is ambitious, don’t call him egotistical. He believes he left all that behind along with football.
“There was a holistic journey of ego death,” he says. “I had an Orange Bowl ring — we won the Orange Bowl [in 2016], so I could have kept playing, and potentially been in the league for four or five years.” But Withers, miles away from his hometown of Jacksonville, had the opportunity to think for a moment. He’d been on the flywheel that takes gifted kids from local fields to pro arenas ever since playing club-team soccer in high school. “Why I played sports was to prove something to my mom,” he says. “Self-worth was poured into if I played well.” Back then, he would start doing homework at 10 p.m., once practice was over, but the trade-off seemed worth it: “It makes your parent happy, and you strive to keep them happy. I have a stepdad who left, a dad …” He trails off; later, he’ll mention that he was largely raised by his mom and Kionte. “And you just think sports is going to make them want to be around you more. It’s this sad reality, being a kid.” Seeking a strong and consistent male role model, Withers bonded with Kionte. “He witnessed more than me, trauma-wise. There was more pressure being the firstborn.”
Withers’ journey in sports had been at once grueling and charmed; following a single season of high school football, he was able to join the squad of FSU, an NCAA powerhouse. But staying in football seemed unsustainable. “That was an identity crisis,” he says. “The first time being away from home — Who am I? My identity was within sports.” Once he left the team, he had to confront himself. In football, “you don’t get time to think about emotions. You make a decision — execute, execute, be perfect, practice, practice, practice — and then, when you take that out of your life, you’re like, What am I witnessing?”
Withers was a theater kid at heart, and a natural ham, but even as he had a sense of his shifting interests, he didn’t get involved in the campus acting scene. “I didn’t leave to chase theater,” he says. “I left it to find myself.” Becoming an actor took a winding path: Post-college, he even got an MBA (also from FSU) as a fallback. “Oh, I can go make six figures at this firm — that’s the safe option,” he recalls thinking.
But risk suits Withers better, especially when his roles clarify his own story. In the third, more conceptual season of “Atlanta,” Withers’ episode stands out, and not just because the series’ main cast isn’t involved. He plays Aaron, a biracial, light-skinned young man torn between his white and Black identities. He’s eligible, or should be, for a college scholarship for Black students, but has been passing for white, and so the scholarship committee denies him. Withers felt as if the experience was so specific to his own life as to be limiting: “I was filming the episode like, Who’s going to relate to this? It’s such a niche experience. But the beauty is the more niche it is, the more personal it feels.”
Withers could relate to its themes. “You know when you read something and you feel seen, like, I have to talk to someone about this?” he says about the script. It turns out that viewers agreed: In a season studded with statements on race in America that were deeply felt but often arty to the point of abstruse, Aaron’s anger and confusion grounded the episode. The character’s entire life has been defined by passing privilege, and being forced to defend his Blackness leaves him unmoored.
The role got Withers attention — and he’s ended up, unlike Aaron, being unapologetically himself on film. Now, his burgeoning career as a romantic lead — opposite Maika Monroe in “Reminders of Him” and May in “Love Love” — breaks an unspoken barrier, as interracial relationships remain rare whether in drama or comedy. “I do have a lot of privilege,” he says, “but I’m grateful to [director] Vanessa Caswill and Colleen Hoover for creating a moment to make Black men and women feel like they deserve space in romantic drama.”
For Withers, work helps reveal new facets of life, while life goes into the work. In “I Know What You Did Last Summer” — which Withers joined as a relative newbie alongside more experienced castmates Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders and Sarah Pidgeon — his spoiled-scion character Teddy covers deep insecurities with a brash manner. “It was written to be this golden boy who can’t get anything right,” says Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the film’s director and co-writer. “It ebbed and flowed as Tyriq stepped into it — so much of that was from Tyriq’s experience, and him being open to bringing that into the character.”
Withers’ conception of Teddy included plenty of pathos. “He’s grieving the father that he wanted,” Withers says, “and lost himself in that, and found friendship and community in partying. I want to keep pushing and defining the leading man as someone who can show their love, show their scars, operate out of grief and communicate.” Sounds heavy — but that communication can include something ebullient, too, and Withers played Teddy with the sort of bonhomie that some former jocks still keep well after high school. “He’s 6-5, he’s an Adonis and then he’s also really funny,” Robinson says. “Sometimes God gives with both hands. The way he would ad-lib as a character that in any other version of the movie would be the dick, he actually was really inclusive and really lovely — the golden retriever.”
Months later came a tonal swerve with “Him,” in which Withers’ Cam Cade is a gridiron prospect who, after a career-threatening injury, attends a training camp led by his idol Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a superstar who has been, from afar, a surrogate father of sorts since Cam lost his own father in childhood. Isaiah trains Cam brutally, eventually making clear that if Cam is to be a star in Isaiah’s image, he will need to take part in supernatural rituals that seem tantamount to selling his soul.
Once again, real life entered in. “It was an uncomfortable exploration of my own grief with sports,” Withers says. (Spoiler alert: At the end of “Him,” Cam walks away from the camp.) Addressing the sports that had once defined, or replaced, his personality, Withers says: “Football, soccer — you were a big part of shaping who I am today, but this is my life.”
Withers was at home playing a jock with more on his mind, but he wanted to match the script’s energy by pushing himself to the brink, and relied on his co-star to do that. “I think he was confident about his abilities, confident about his look, his charisma,” says Wayans, who himself was shifting gears from comedies like “Scary Movie” to play a football legend daring Withers’ character to challenge him. “I was able to push certain buttons because I came at him a different way, with the darkness within my humor.” Filming a scene in which Isaiah humiliates Cam, Withers asked Wayans to crack jokes about Kionte’s death — the defining event of Withers’ life, and his lowest point.
“He asked, and it was brave of him to go there,” Wayans says. “You could see the effect in his eyes — and I just hugged him afterward.”
“Marlon was like, ‘You sure?,’ God bless his soul. I wanted to give him permission to provoke a performance,” Withers says. “I’m not saying this is healthy, but I was trying to infuse my real-life experience into the movie. I want to lay my whole life out there.”
Withers can speak in broad, therapy-inflected terms about his life, seeming to hold back some essential part to keep, or to use in a performance. (This is true for consequential things and relatively light ones: He tells me, for example, that he and his friends like to put on “presentations” to educate each other, but he won’t elaborate on what his last presentation was about beyond the single word “underwear.”)
Art helps Withers open up: In “Reminders of Him,” his character Ledger feels a complicated joy in keeping up a relationship with the young child of a lost loved one. “Tyriq has a very sensitive side as does Ledger,” Hoover, the novelist and first-time screenwriter of the film, writes in an email. “He connected personally with the story, which isn’t something I would wish on anyone, but I do feel like his personal connection to the role definitely helped to make his performance feel so authentic.”
After all, work is the place where silence gets to be broken. In childhood, as a would-be sports star, “I didn’t understand emotion was a gift,” Withers says. “There was a level of emotional suicide — you can’t cry; you have to stuff your emotions down — and I think that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do with masculinity. To safely instill masculinity is to tap into the vulnerability, so that we can make better men.”
And Withers isn’t afraid of either vulnerability or showing a bit of himself — in terms celebrity-watchers can understand. “I love red carpets,” Withers says. He recently made his Met Gala debut, wearing head-to-toe Louis Vuitton — a glittering custom trenchcoat over a sheer shirt. “In a world where you’re constantly told to dim your light, I think red carpets are the one place where you can be 100% yourself and your job is to show up and serve unapologetically. I’ve come from an experience of ‘Who does he think he is?,’ growing up in Jacksonville. Now I’m in a place where it’s celebrated.”
What lies beyond “Love Love” for Withers? “I want to show people I can play ball in the comedian realm,” he says. “And we all have the saving-the-world sci-fi ambition. And then there’s a part where I want to direct.” He cites the movie “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’ 2022 memory piece about a daughter reflecting on Paul Mescal’s distant, flawed father character, as the type of film he wants to make. “That’ll be another ego death — directing things that I’m not in.”
But first comes his tennis romantic dramedy. For Withers, the little-celebrated ball boy character has a certain untapped dramatic potential. “We’re all closer to the ball boy than the No. 1 player,” he says. “My character’s struggling with his path in life. Do I chase the dream, or do I change the dream?”
With “Love Love,” Withers has been kicking the tires as an EP. “It’s a blessing to get to challenge the script, challenge the storyline, challenge the character,” he says. In his career so far, he’s found himself, serendipitously, in stories that resonated with his life; now, he wants to use film the way he uses presentations with his friends, to share more of himself — with intention. “I want to have a fingerprint,” Withers says. “I want to have a voice. I want people to feel the essence of my toolbox.”
