Rising Stars: Meet Richard Magyan of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard Magyan.

Hi Richard, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My journey has been anything but linear, but looking back, I can see how a lot of the pieces have connected.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and spent most of my childhood and teenage years as an athlete. I played baseball from about age nine through 19, and for a long time I wanted to take the sport as far as I possibly could. At the same time, another part of me was developing. I started performing around age 12, and by the time I was 15 or 16, I had really discovered my love for the performing arts and began to see myself pursuing entertainment long-term. I knew that I was already a gifted athlete, but I wanted to take those gifts in another (potentially more challenging) direction.

Growing up on the East Coast, musical theater felt like the most traditional path into a professional performing career. I didn’t begin seriously pursuing it until around 17, which already felt late compared with people who had been singing, dancing and acting since childhood. Eventually, I attended school for musical theater and began immersing myself more seriously in that world.

Then the pandemic interrupted my training and became an unexpected turning point for me. When the industry and the world began opening back up, I found myself reconsidering what I wanted my career to look like. That ultimately helped bring me to Los Angeles, where I began pursuing training and entertainment through a much more commercial lens.

Los Angeles exposed me to an entirely different side of performance, and dance became one of the things that completely changed the direction of my life. I hadn’t grown up as a competition or studio dancer, so when I began training seriously, I was entering rooms alongside people who had years—sometimes their entire lives—of experience ahead of me. It was incredibly humbling, but I think my background as an athlete helped me embrace that process. I knew how to train, how to be coached, how to compete with myself, and how to keep showing up when the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be felt enormous.

Over time, that work began to compound. I went from simply trying to keep up in dance classes to performing, auditioning, building relationships within the dance community, and eventually signing with professional representation. More recently, I’ve also expanded into modeling and acting. I’ve signed with modeling representation and begun attending professional castings, while acting has become another discipline I’m seriously studying as I continue developing myself as a performer.

Throughout that journey, fitness has remained a major part of my life and career. I’ve built a career as a personal trainer, and in a lot of ways it connects directly back to the athlete I was growing up. Fitness has given me a way to help other people become stronger and more capable, while also giving me the ability to support myself and invest in my own artistic development in an industry where work is never guaranteed.

Where I am today feels like the beginning of a new chapter. For years, so much of my focus was simply on developing—becoming capable enough to belong in the rooms I wanted to be in. Now I’m beginning to see some of that work turn into opportunities across dance, modeling and acting. I’m still very much a student, and I know I have a tremendous amount of growing left to do, but I’m beginning to see myself less as someone trying to become an entertainer and more as someone actively building a career as one.

Ultimately, I don’t know that I want to limit myself to one title. Ive always had multiple interests, but I think the common thread throughout my life has always been some combination of artistry and athleticism.

If there’s one thing my journey has taught me, it’s that your starting point doesn’t necessarily determine where you’re allowed to go. I’ve changed directions, taken big risks, started things later than other people, supported myself while pursuing them, and spent plenty of time being uncomfortable and uncertain. I’ve learned that sometimes the most important thing you can do is keep putting yourself in the room, keep doing the work, and stay open enough to recognize when the next door starts to open.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My journey has been far from linear. I think one of the biggest challenges throughout my journey has been learning how to be comfortable starting late and being willing to be a beginner in environments where a lot of people around me had been developing their craft for most of their lives.

When I began seriously pursuing musical theater around 18, I already felt behind people who had been singing, acting and dancing since childhood. Then, when I eventually found my way into commercial dance in Los Angeles, I experienced that feeling all over again on an even bigger scale. I was walking into rooms with dancers who had 10, 15, sometimes 20 years of training behind them. There were plenty of classes where simply keeping up felt like an accomplishment.

That can be challenging mentally. It’s very easy to look around a room and use everyone else’s experience as evidence that you don’t belong there. I had to learn to stop measuring my beginning against somebody else’s middle. Instead, I tried to focus on whether I was better than I had been six months earlier, three months earlier, or even the week/day before.

Another major challenge has been the financial reality of pursuing a creative career. I’m grateful that i’ve been able to successfully support myself while in pursuit of my highest self. The reality is that Los Angeles is expensive, and training is not a small investment. Classes, programs, headshots, transportation, representation materials and simply having enough time available to audition and train all require resources. I’ve spent years balancing personal training and coaching with dance training, auditions, performances, acting classes and everything else that comes with trying to build a career in entertainment.

There have been periods where it has felt like I’m working two careers at the same time: one that pays for my life and another that I’m trying to build into my life. That balancing act can be exhausting. You need to work enough to afford the training, but you also need enough time and energy left over to actually do the training. Then, as opportunities start coming, you have to remain available enough to say yes to them and COMMIT.

The pandemic was another major interruption. I was in the middle of getting my BFA when the industry shut down. the industry shut down, and the path I thought I was following suddenly didn’t exist the same way. At the time, that uncertainty was difficult, but looking back, it forced me to reconsider what I actually wanted my life to look like, and I’ve gone to great lengths to maintain. Looking back, that disruption actually granted me the pets mission to truly take a shot at my dreams.

Probably the hardest challenge, though, has been learning to trust a path that doesn’t always provide immediate evidence that it’s working. Creative careers involve a lot of uncertainty. You can train for months without booking anything. You can audition and never hear back. You can work incredibly hard and still watch someone else get the opportunity. There isn’t always a clear ladder where doing A guarantees that B will happen.

I’ve had to learn that I can control the quality of my work, how prepared I am, how I treat people, how consistently I show up, and how willing I am to keep growing. I can’t control exactly when an opportunity arrives or where it ultimately leads.

That idea has changed my relationship with failure and rejection. I’m much less interested now in whether every individual class, audition, casting or opportunity produces an immediate result. I’m more interested in whether I’m continuing to become the person I know I’m capable of becoming.

The road still isn’t smooth, and honestly, I don’t expect it ever will be. But I’ve learned that uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going in the wrong direction. Sometimes you have to keep doing the work long enough for the results to catch up.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Growing up, I spent a lot of my time balancing rehearsals, baseball practices, even a few modeling gigs for sports. I’m grateful that not much of that has changed to this day.

As of the last few years, developing as a dancer has been the center of my time and attention. However, at my core, i’ve never been one thing. I’ve always handled multiple endeavors, and it seems like a lot of what i’ve learned and what i’ve done over the course of my life has followed me to where I am to this day. I believe in utilizing as many of my gifts as possible, even if they require development! More specifically, I’m building toward a career that allows me to work across dance, modeling, acting, choreography, and other forms of commercial entertainment.

As a dancer, much of my training and artistic identity lives within commercial dance, with a particular love for R&B. What interests me most is getting to the point in my creativity that I can execute movement exactly the way I want to. To this day, i’ve performed in everything from regional musical theater, to dancing behind artists on stages and in music videos. I’m extremely grateful for the many places that dance has taken me. It would be a dream of mine to eventually teach choreography at studios both in and outside of the country!

More recently, I’ve also begun developing professionally as a model. I’m represented and have started attending professional castings for runway and commercial work.. Its also not lost on me much how modeling and dance intersect and share many commonalities. It’s been an exciting extension of my training as a professional.

Acting is another area I’m taking increasingly seriously. I’m currently training and continuing to develop the craft, and I see it as another dimension of becoming a more complete professional I don’t feel the need to rush into calling myself something before I’ve earned it, but I do want to remain open to where that work can eventually take me.

Alongside my creative career, I’m also a personal trainer and performance coach. My background in athletics, strength and conditioning has become a huge part of what makes me who I am as a performer. I don’t just want a body that looks athletic—I want one that can actually perform. I want to be strong, mobile, explosive, expressive, and capable of handling the physical demands of dance and entertainment. That’s also the philosophy I try to bring to the people I coach.

What I’m most proud of is probably the amount of ground I’ve been able to cover despite beginning much of this later than the traditional timeline. I didn’t grow up as a competition dancer. I wasn’t training professionally from childhood. I’ve had to build a lot of these skills as an adult while simultaneously supporting myself and learning how the entertainment industry works.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
If there’s anything else I’d want to leave with someone reading this, it’s that I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have our lives figured out on a certain timeline. I’ve definitely done that.

what I’ve learned the most so far is that there is no one correct timeline, and we are all on our own journey. Learning how to not only accept that but embrace it and use it for your own growth can be a superpower in itself. My decisions to this point have forced me to develop a level of humility and work ethic that I don’t know if I would have developed otherwise.

Lately, I’ve been focused solely on remaining present for the life I have right now. I have enormous goals for myself, There are artists I want to work with, campaigns I want to shoot, and people I want to help through fitness. Yet, above all, theres a lot that’s outside of our control, so I try to treat every day like it’s my last!

Ultimately, i’m just getting started. I don’t know exactly what my career is going to look like five or ten years from now, and I’m actually becoming more comfortable with that. At the end of the day, I want to continue being a student, continue putting myself in rooms that challenge me, continue pursuing my best self.

If Theres someone reading this that feels behind, or feels like they missed the window to start something they genuinely care about, I hope my story can be a small reminder that starting late doesn’t mean you’re too late. Sometimes you just have to be willing to begin before you have any proof of where it’s going to lead.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richardmagyan?stkn=eTNhdmpuajA3OWdh&utm_source=qr

Image Credits
Vince Trupsin
Tony Moux