We recently connected with Ryan R. Rathbun and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan R., looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

What started my learning process was less of an output of performance, and more an input of stories. I was a big reader when I was growing up. I’d get distracted in class. I’d not pay attention to the lessons because I was reading. I was reading stuff that was a little bit out of the ordinary for my age, I picked up Merlin, I picked up Robinson Crusoe, and I was reading collections of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. By ten I was reading nonfiction psychology books, and I think at that point I would look around me and realize that there was something about the human condition that not everybody understood, and I desperately wanted to understand it better than anyone else. For lack of a better term, I embarked on this journey of discovery of what it was like to be a person. In my early teens, I was living in Ecuador, studying theatre and improv, experiencing a major cultural shift, and I realized that my personal experience was not universal, so I sort of began to look outwards instead of looking inwards, and decided to keep training and observing the behaviors of others, and the ways people interact, and the ways people feel, and the different types of feeling that exist in the world. That’s still very much my goal. I’ve since studied a little bit of dance and a little bit of singing, but what I realize is to be an actor is to be able to reach those different points of truth that speak to who people really are, and to be a vessel for a story, and to be the best vessel that I can be. This is why when asked about my process I never have a set process, I may pull from a certain theatre technique, or I may pull from something more instinctive. It’s always kind of conditional on what the work is. So I think that’s my main dedication. Dedication to the work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

For folks that may have never heard of me, my name is Ryan Rathbun. For 23 years I’ve trained as an actor and an artist. For me, that’s anything from taking classes, and reading acting literature to getting a theatre degree but mostly it’s sitting in a public place silently observing people and how they behave. The fire started as this need to be physical with my performance, to entertain, to tell stories using my just body and mind. As a youngster I would give puppet shows to family and friends, I’d write jokes, and I actively sought out community theatre.
I’m also a painter, a dancer, and an art director, and I’ve become fascinated with production and everything that moves behind the scenes. Since moving to Los Angeles in 2021, right after the COVID pandemic, I’ve pretty much worn every hat in the book. I’ve directed, I’ve been a makeup artist, I’ve cast, I’ve produced, which is something I want to continue to do. Acting will always be my first love and continues to be my passion, just because I can’t seem to rip myself away from it, I mean every time I look in another direction it pulls me back. It’s truly my home in this world. I don’t know what I’d be doing otherwise if I weren’t performing and working on new characters. I have an intense love for traditional theatre and an intense love for live performance. I think there’s a unique energy that everyone in the room tunes themselves to while watching something happen in real-time, and I hope to see that form of live performance come back in a huge capacity in the next few years. As an actor, I’ve starred in multiple indie films. I worked on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I worked on Babylon which came out last year, and I’m consistently producing and acting in shorts in between full-scale projects. My main goal as an actor is to be transformative. I’ve always been more comfortable in someone else’s skin than in my own – I’ve worked my whole life to find something real and human in all of these characters because, at the end of the day, I think that this art form specifically reminds people what it’s like to be a human being, and how to connect with other human beings. It’s vital to stay grounded and unified as a population on this planet, especially in such a trying time. A lot of my work revolves around capturing private moments that regular people don’t have access to. Watching something like The Skin of our teeth, Streetcar Named Desire, or Tartuffe as the audience you’re peering into something you’re sort of unwelcome in. Something very private. There’s no real-world alternative to that, but through acting and performance, we can reach an understanding of what it is to be human. What I love about it is that it’s constant experimentation rather than a search for tangible answers. That’s what I love about actors and this community of artists in Los Angeles. Everybody is trying to capture something, connect with someone, but I think if you can reach beyond the screen or the stage and touch the soul of even one person in an audience then you’ve done your due diligence as an actor. That’s what I work to bring into the world through acting and filmmaking.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This has been a big one for me, Honestly. I think this is something that many great actors struggle with in their lives, and a lot of young people tend to reach this same conclusion and not really examine it too hard. That’s the idea that your personal hardships in life are what make you special as an artist, or what give you depth as an artist. I was around 14 years old – I’ve been through a number of what I’d call “hard times” in my life, especially during my childhood and teenage years. Family stuff, issues with my own identity, and violence in the world that I’d encountered. For several years after deciding to pursue acting, I thought that this internal torture was what validated me as a performer – I understand why it could seem useful, of course, if you’ve suffered an extreme emotion in your life, it would make sense to bring it into your acting, or even make it one of the defining factors in your art. What I’ve realized is that what makes you special as an artist is the art that you do. That might seem overly simple to a lot of people, but I’ve seen plenty of actors get in their heads and cling to the trauma that makes them feel special and valid, but you are valid if you are creating work. There’s a difference between putting a lot of effort into something vs. torturing yourself with it – I personally had incorporated a lot of that into my process, and so in the past few years in my professional career I’ve worked hard to bring awareness to the idea that acting IS acting. It’s not the things that hurt you in life that make you special and an excellent performer, it’s the art you put into the world that makes you special.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The two books that have been the most transformative, (especially in my adult life, where things can get hectic and creative blocks can arise) Are On Writing by Stephen King, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It’s very easy to dig a metaphorical hole and bury oneself in it as an artist, especially when you make the leap into the professional world. Both books, (and their authors) understand what it takes to dig yourself out of that hole. Some others worth mentioning are Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. For those looking to learn about acting techniques, a good place to start would be with the Stanislavski System by Sonia Moore, Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin, and Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting.
There are thousands of resources that can enrich your inner artist, my advice is to be open-minded and to develop an approach that works for you personally.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm11917254/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanrrathbun/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ryan.rathbun.731/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-r-b451a7112/

Image Credits
Photos (headshots) by David Zaugh, Photos in green jacket taken by Kyle Burman