Hiro Murai on Wiley: a mirror, not a mystery

One of Atlanta’s most elusive figures appears in season 3, episode 5, “Cancer Attack,” when Alfred Miles, aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), loses his phone during a Budapest performance. The episode pivots away from the search and toward a soft-spoken, guitar-playing stranger named Wiley (Alien Earth’s Samuel Blenkin), who plays a haunting song for Al and admits he has no idea where the phone is.

Wiley resists a tidy explanation. He doesn’t function like a conventional plot device, and the show leaves him deliberately vague — a momentary presence fans have read as anything from a literal thief to a ghost, a hallucination or a living metaphor for the edges of fame and visibility.

In an interview about his new series Widow’s Bay, Hiro Murai offered a closer reading: “That whole season is sort of about ghosts, apparitions that are like projections of other characters,” he said. “So I don't think of Wiley as a ghost himself, but I do think he’s sort of like a mirror for Paper Boi.

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