Name: Colton Ryan
SXSW project: Hulu true-crime miniseries “The Girl From Plainville”
Notable past credits: “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Little Voice”
First impressions of Austin: “Austin is like an oasis. It reminds me of home [Kentucky] in so many ways, and also feels incredibly like my new home — New York. The minute I got here, I felt very cosmically OK. It felt like, oh, OK — I get the tempo.”
Ryan stars in Hulu’s forthcoming miniseries “The Girl From Plainville,” which recounts the events surrounding the involuntary manslaughter case for Michelle Carter, who encouraged her boyfriend, Conrad Roy 3rd, to take his life over text message in 2014. The show stars Elle Fanning as Carter, and Ryan as the late Roy, who was 18 when he died.
“When all this happened, I was the same age. And so what I remember of [the trial] is through the lens of me at 18 years old,” says Ryan. “I knew about it peripherally, but what I knew about it was so void of emotion. It was court of public opinion.”
The show, which has been partially fictionalized, shifts focus from courtroom spectacle to the interior experience of the two main characters, who both struggled with mental illness as teenagers. Ryan was interested in creating a nuanced portrayal of “what the day-to-day life would have looked like for [Roy],” he says. “What it actually looks like to be both living and surviving every day with this darkness.”
In addition to watching Erin Lee Carr’s documentary about the case, which premiered at SXSW in 2018, Ryan also looked to video diaries filmed by Roy to tap into his experience. “He would talk about himself in an almost third-person objective way,” says the actor. “But when he would break out of it and look into the camera and start do funny voices, it reminded me so much of being young and having energy to express — and feeling displaced when you’re trying to express yourself, to find yourself.”