EXCLUSIVE: 'Empire's' Trai Byers on Andre's Breakdown, Relationship With Jennifer Hudson

By Danielle Turchiano , The Hollywood Reporter | March 04, 2015 11:15 PM EST

Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard in the premiere episode of Empire on Jan. 7, 2015. 

Chuck Hodes/FOX 

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the ninth episode of Empire's first season, Unto the Breach.]

Since Empire's pilot, the Fox hip-hop drama teased that the eldest Lyon son, Andre (Trai Byers), had an illness that kept Lucious (Terrence Howard) from handing over the keys to his kingdom. Save for a small physical stumble one night at his father's club Laviticus, Andre seemed to have his bipolar disorder under control. A combination of his medication, doting wife Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday) and clear-cut mission to get between younger brothers Jamal (Jussie Smollett) and Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) combined to keep Andre focused and leveled. But that all changed Wednesday.

After Lucious' "nay" vote rejected Andre from becoming interim CEO should the head of Empire Entertainment become incapacitated, that further drove home just how little the magnate respected his son and his decisions that was further exacerbated by admitting his disapproval of Andre's marriage to a white woman. That's when it seemed all Andre was working toward crumbled -- setting him off on a downward spiral.

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First, he almost shot himself but then, in the next episode, he flushed his meds, which brought on his increasingly erratic behavior that included almost getting into a fist fight with his brothers while trapped in an elevator. It ended with him stomping around the Empire Entertainment boardroom, calling his father a murderer in front of those outside the family, and, eventually, getting restrained and sedated before being sent off on a 48-hour psychiatric hold.

"I don't think that Andre wanted to have any signs of weakness; he didn't want to accept the bipolar disorder," Byers tells The Hollywood Reporter. "But at this point, it's like 'Who am I? My father doesn't want me; my mother's only concerned about Jamal; I don't have anybody but my wife. This is who I am, so I'm going to be me, flaws and all.' I like the analogy of cutting off your nose to spite your face because in accepting [the disorder] and going with the flow instead of treating it does that, but it's also a great platform to showcase the disorder -- one that I think we kind of sweep under the rug as a nation."

Although the show put Andre's disease on the back burner for more than the first half of the season, it's now front and center of the Fox breakout drama. Here, THR talks with Byers about the complicated role and what it might take for Andre to regain control.

For so much of the first season of Empire you played Andre seemingly physically restrained in the way he carried himself. He seemed so together, and ultimately he was because he was on his meds. How much of that was intentional to show a greater juxtaposition in the moments he was off, and were there moments you wanted to hit more at what he goes through internally that you didn't because it would have tipped the hand to what was to come?

Everything was a decision; there's nothing there that's by default at all. I didn't get advance knowledge of where the character was going; we kind of went script by script, so with that, I trained for a long time. [Exec producer] Lee Daniels told me my character was bipolar and it would change the arc of the character from the time we did the pilot because then Andre was just depressed. They developed the disorder after we got picked up. It was about playing the subtleties and letting other things affect Andre. There were some episodes where we didn't reference Andre's disorder at all; it was about remembering and letting the emotions of being the odd man out, always forgotten, never really given the full credit due affect him; let that be the reason he was kind of wigging out but also having the underlying bipolar disorder be the foundation of what you saw.

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At the end of Unto the Breach, you really got to explode verbally and physically inside that boardroom. Talk a little bit about filming that scene -- how much of it was your improv i