We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tyler Phan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tyler below.
Hi Tyler, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
I realized pretty early in highschool that I wanted to become an actor but I knew that my parents didn’t favor the idea of arts as a career, so I just swept this desire under the rug. After dabbling a bit in computer science I decided that I’d do that for a career. Then, I took my second computer science class which utterly destroyed any interest and understanding I had in it. Unfortunately for me, the moment I realized I didn’t want to do computer science anymore was also the moment I needed to pick a major for college.
As I thought really hard about what I wanted to do, I realized that I just could not live without being creative. Telling stories and making art is where I derive so much joy and wouldn’t dare to let go of it in my daily life.
After coming upon this revelation, I decided to choose Illustration as my major because I’d been drawing all my life and felt that it would disappoint my parents less than acting. I also figured I’d be able to work on movies and in turn find opportunities within the studio to act. However, I quickly found out this was not the case and realized that if I wanted to act as a career, I’d have to actively take the steps to make it happen.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m pursuing a career in acting and concept art for movies because I really do believe that movies are magic and I want to help create magic.
Movies are able to reignite our passions and make us feel seen, personally whenever I watch movies I never really feel alone. I’m mainly interested in stories that help people feel less alone while also inspiring them. I think loneliness is a universal feeling so in creating stories that focus around it, the audience is more easily able to empathize with the character and learn to be more empathetic towards one another.
I think my love for making character concept art helps to drive my passion for acting and vice versa. Both of my passions supplement one another in the sense that I’m constantly creating characters and dissecting stories, I’m just looking at each with a different perspective depending on which hat I have on. All in all, this allows me to become a more well-rounded story teller.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I’d say learning to network is an important skill to have because it allows us to connect with people who passionately create the kinds of work that we are just as passionate about. Of course, it’s easier said than done.
At the moment, I’m trying to connect with professionals within the industry and it always shoots my social anxiety through the roof, especially because I get self conscious that they may not want to talk to me since I’m so much younger than them. However, whenever I manage to muster up the strength to keep pushing through the awkwardness I’m always able to find that the people I’m eager to talk to are just as eager to talk to me! There’s also this weird pressure of feeling like I need to make a great, memorable first impression with a lot of the people I meet and while I do think first impressions matter, it’s not the end all be all. Especially because there’s always the opportunity to follow up digitally and strengthen connections afterwards.
I think persistence is also a really important skill. No matter what path we all take, there is going to be a mix of success and failure towards our goals. Even when our failures aren’t so big or are an expected part of the process it can be really discouraging. Sometimes failure occurs because of factors way out of our control and other times we just need to reframe our approach. But as long as we take a little lesson from each failure and keep trying, there will eventually be success. The biggest killer of success is inaction.
When I first decided to take control of my acting career, I asked other people how I should start and I always got vague answers like “everyone has their own journey” or “there’s so many different ways to get into the business” but I never got an actual answer. So I just used Google. There’s so many valuable resources on the internet nowadays that as long as you do your research and gather information from multiple different sources you’re bound to find an answer to your questions. Facebook is pretty helpful too! In my case, I’m able to find a plethora of filmmaking/acting groups on Facebooks and network that way.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
Always, always, always! I’m interested in connecting with anyone to be honest because I love hearing about the stories people are passionate about. But I will say I absolutely love anything fiction whether that be Sci-Fi or Fantasy. I’ve been really wanting to act in fantasy, adventure projects so if there’s anyone out there interested in telling these kinds of stories I’d love to connect! I’m mostly active on Instagram so that’ll be a good place to reach out 🙂
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.imdb.me/tylerphan
- Instagram:Actor: @t.jphan Art: @relytart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerphan888tjp/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@relytart
Image Credits
Kenneth Dolin Photography, Eljin Yoo, Emett Penaloza, Tyler Phan