Spotlight on Actor and Filmmaker Sam Kryszek

Filmmaker and actor Sam Kryszek, originally from Portland, was a performer at a young age. At the age of thirteen, he joined the famed Magic Castle’s program for Young Magicians. He convinced his parents to allow him to fly back and forth from Portland to Los Angeles to attend classes and meetings. As a Junior Magician, he performed regularly at the exclusive club.

The entertainment industry ran in his family’s blood. Sam grew up alongside the lions, tigers, and bears that his mother trained for the entertainment world. He learned eclectic skills like archery, horseback riding, martial arts, and is a skilled marksman. Although he always wanted to be an actor, he decided to pursue a more practical route and was accepted to Loyola Marymount University to study film and animation.

While he was still in college, he opened a post-production and visual effects company with his brother, Raphael Kryszek, who is an established producer and Emmy Winner for a non-fiction short form project in 2015.

But acting always called to him, so he decided to finally pursue his dream on the other side of the camera. Sam soon booked a role on Amazon’s “Jean-Claude Van Johnson,” but he decided to join forces with his brother and produce a short independently.

Being big fans of sci-fi adventures like “Star Trek” and “Back to The Future,” Sam and his brother had been thinking about doing a time travel short for a while. They used the concept of sending messages going back and forth through time, instead of a person. “My brother and I are real geeks and we have been tinkering with quantum computing so we came up with the idea of sending actual data bits back in time through an Alexa,” Sam says.

The result of their collaboration is the award-winning short, “The Way the Future Was,” in which Sam he plays the lead character, Matt, who discovers that he is caught between two realities and needs to send messages between time to save his life. He stars alongside the legendary Kevin Pollak.

They shot the film in four days and it is currently playing on the film festival circuit. Sam will be travelling with the film and representing it at various screenings including the Phoenix Sci-Fi Festival, Houston World Fest and Sci-Fi London.

Sam and his brother are currently working on packaging the film for a series version.

“Don’t follow your dreams. Create your dreams.” Sam says. He quotes comedian Mitch Hedberg, “I’m tired of following my dreams. I will ask them where they are going and meet up with them later.”