Peter Craig on Writing 'Dope Thief' and Blowing Up the Status Quo
June 10, 2025
Peter Craig is best known for writing some of the most successful blockbusters in recent memory, from The Town and Top Gun: Maverick to The Batman and Gladiator 2. But his latest project is a thrilling pivot into television with Dope Thief, a gritty, character-driven crime drama now streaming on Apple TV+ with a pilot directed by Ridley Scott.
Dope Thief is about two best friends, Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who owe their deep bond to the time they spent together locked up as kids. Street-smart but cautious, Ray and Manny spend their time posing as DEA agents, infiltrating low-level drug houses around Philly, confiscating any cash, drugs and guns they can get their hands on. The scam is perfect for making extra money and no one gets hurt – until one raid goes very, very wrong.
Thematically, the show is right up Craig’s dark alley. But moving from the big screen to the small one was never really the plan.
“I didn’t set out to do TV,” Craig admits. “Apple had this book I really liked [Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya], and I just started playing with it, writing a few episodes here and there during COVID, while working on other things.”
When a project with director Ridley Scott fell through, Craig showed Scott the pilot. Scott was in. Actor Brian Tyree Henry soon signed on, and just like that, Dope Thief had its director, lead actor, and a greenlight.
But transitioning from features to the long-haul storytelling of television came with new challenges, especially when it came to crafting the TV pilot – which most of us know is very different from a traditional three-act screenplay.
TV Pilot = Inciting Incident
“I read all of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, anything I could get my hands on,” says Craig. “What I noticed about all of them is that the whole pilot can kind of be the inciting incident. That’s how I looked at it, almost as the equivalent of the first 12 to 15 pages of a screenplay. Just give us the premise, let us know who these characters are, but leave enough room to expand in all these other directions.”
Craig liked that Tafoya’s book played with the reader’s expectations around classic crime tropes and often went in unexpected directions. He knew that flipping those tropes would be key to creating a fresh and exciting crime show.
“As a screenwriter, I spend so much time on those first 12 pages. That’s always when the status quo gets totally upended,” he says. “But what I thought was interesting about Dope Thief is that these guys already had a hard time with any kind of status quo. They were in and out of jail, doing messy things. They hadn’t really defined what their lives were.”
From Chaos to Clarity (and Back Again)
So instead of the pilot blowing up a clean, ordered world, Craig flipped the formula: “I thought, let’s do it in a reverse way. They start out in this mess, and they do something so bad that it brings a kind of clarity. Suddenly, they only have one goal: survive and figure out what really matters.”
That clarity, however, is complicated by deeply buried trauma and tangled relationships. In one particularly emotional scene in episode two, Ray confronts his abusive father, played with chilling perfection by Ving Rhames. This scene is so intense it takes the show to a much deeper, psychological level.
“The relationship between Ray and his dad was one of my favorite dynamics to write,” Craig says. “Ray remembers everything. His father, who’s now clean, doesn’t. That’s the tragedy of addiction – it robs you of shared memory. They love each other, but they can’t even speak the same emotional language.”
The Trauma Bond
Ray and Manny’s relationship isn’t much easier. “It’s a trauma bond,” says Craig. “They defended each other in juvie. They’re like war buddies who can’t leave the battlefield. They won’t let each other grow.”
Despite their criminal acts, the duo remains surprisingly sympathetic – a couple of characters the audience can root for. “They’re not evil. They’re products of a neighborhood that’s deeply corrupt. In their minds, skimming a little off the top is just taking back what was stolen from them.”
For Craig, writing characters who do the wrong things but still earn audience empathy comes down to one rule: stay rooted in character, not plot twists. “TV’s obsession with being clever can sometimes hurt storytelling. The most sophisticated thing you can do is tell the truth about people. That’s what shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men did so well. The reversals came from character, not just surprise.”
When asked what advice he’d offer to writers attempting their own crime dramas, Craig said this: “Don’t chase cleverness. Chase character. Ask how people are lying to themselves and to each other. That’s where the real twists come from.”
Sir Ridley Scott
Craig has worked with Ridley Scott previously on Gladiator 2, so getting him involved in this TV show was a dream come true.
“He’s a legend, but what people don’t always see is how much fun he’s having. He’s in his horse trailer with six monitors, cracking jokes, telling stories from Alien or Thelma & Louise between takes. He just loves the work and that joy is contagious.”
Dope Thief Season 2?
Though Craig would love to come back for a second season of the show, there’s a lot of uncertainty and nothing has been determined. “We don’t know yet,” Craig says. “There’s a bit of a market correction happening across the industry. Everyone’s trying to figure out what the landscape will be. But I’d love to keep going. I’ve fallen in love with TV as much as I love writing novels.”
Dope Thief is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
