After establishing himself on the Chicago theater scene in local productions of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Objects in the Mirror,” Daniel

Kyri has made a successful transition to episodic television, starring as Darren Ritter, an openly gay Black firefighter, on the hit NBC procedural drama “Chicago Fire.”

 

 

It’s an experience that Kyri, who identifies as queer and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, described as “a little piece of magic” in a recent interview.

“In a lot of ways, it really does feel that way, because how often, over the course of history, do people like us get to tell our stories?” he said. “Of course, my story isn’t exactly like Ritter’s, but … it just feels so special to me. It holds a place of honor in my life, and I don’t think that that will ever end for as long as I am blessed and able to breathe into this role.”

 

 

In the summer of 2018, Kyri was playing the titular character in a production of “Hamlet” — which was being reimagined by a team of Black artists — when he received an audition for a possible recurring role in the seventh season of “Chicago Fire.” With his strenuous performance schedule weighing heavily on him, he was planning to take a break from acting in order to focus on writing, as he and writing

 

 

partner Bea Cordelia had just launched a web series (“The T”) about the relationship between a white trans woman and a Black queer man in Chicago. But he still felt inclined to audition for his first TV role, even if he soon discovered that he was the only Black man in the waiting room.

“To be candid, one of the things I remember most was walking into a room and seeing a type so unlike mine amongst fellow actors and thinking to myself, ‘Oh, there’s no way I’m going to get this,’” Kyri said with a smile. “And interestingly enough, that opened me up to just play a little bit more and leave all the work that I had done on the side. I made some adjustments per the director’s instruction and found something even deeper. It was, no pun intended, straight into the fire after that.”

While his arc was only supposed to last two to three episodes, Kyri began reappearing heavily on the firefighting drama for two seasons, appearing in a total of 36 episodes before being promoted to a series regular last August. During that time, he has been able to work “organically and collaboratively” with the writers — who, he said, “are so good at striking such a lovely, well-balanced tone between comedy and drama, between the everyday and the adrenaline-inducing” — to incorporate parts of his own identity and lived experience into his breakout role.

As the writers continued to write him into major plotlines, Kyri discovered that his character was going to come out as gay at the start of the eighth season. Having used his web series to explore the intersectionality of various identities, including his own as a queer Black man, the actor immediately understood the gravity of the storyline and felt a certain level of responsibility to get it right.

“Because my web series felt like a kind of coming out, and then [with] this historic moment in the context of the ‘One Chicago’ world, for this Black, male character to come out as gay in this blue-collar, first-responder world, I wanted to do it justice, more importantly,” he said.