Hoyt Richards – Actor/Writer/Filmmaker/Co-founder and Executive of Tortoise Entertainment

Originally from the Main Line area outside Philadelphia, Hoyt was a scholar-athlete who graduated from Princeton with a BA in Economics where he also played football. In his early career, Hoyt worked as a fashion model for Ford and Wihelmina Models and is considered by many to be the world’s first male supermodel. Over his fifteen-year career, Hoyt was the face of numerous campaigns for the industry’s top designers and he appeared in over three hundred commercials. In 2000, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as an actor and now has over twenty-five films to his credit. Expanding his skill set to include directing, screenwriting, editing and producing, Hoyt created his own production company, Tortoise Entertainment in 2010. With Tortoise, Hoyt has produced two feature films: Dumbbells, a buddy comedy set in a gym, and Intersection, a romantic thriller. So far, these films have won over a hundred and twenty-five awards combined on the festival circuit over the last year. Hoyt has won multiple awards for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. In 2015, Hoyt co-founded a theatrical servicing & distribution company that caters to independent filmmakers. Currently, he is working on a documentary that chronicles his twenty-year journey into the Eternal Values religious cult and his subsequent escape and recovery. Hoyt speaks publicly about the dangers and lessons learned from his experience with cultic and abusive environments. He also assists families and individuals who have loved ones caught in cultic situations.

Here are some stills: