Ryan Guzman

From MMA Cages to Hollywood Spotlights

Ryan Guzman never planned to make a living pretending to be someone else. In 2010, his reality revolved around the octagon and mixed martial arts fights in Sacramento, California. But fate often has more profitable plans for faces that fit a very specific aesthetic mold. After leaving baseball due to a shoulder injury, he moved to Los Angeles to try his luck as a commercial model.

No one expected a fighter to dance like that.

In 2012, he landed the lead role in Step Up Revolution without ever having taken a single professional dance class. The shoot forced him to train fifteen hours a day to keep up with the elite dancers surrounding him. But the gamble paid off, because the film grossed more than $140 million worldwide. So the young Texan went from sleeping on friends' couches to headlining one of the most profitable youth franchises of the decade.

In 2014, he reprised his role as Sean Asa in Step Up: All In. That sequel helped the industry stop seeing him as a simple athlete and start considering him a safe commercial asset. But Guzman did not want to get stuck in dance-movie choreography and staged sweat. He was looking for something darker.

Richard Linklater's Filter

His chance to prove he could carry a complex script came in 2015 with The Boy Next Door. Sharing the screen with Jennifer Lopez brought an aggressive level of media exposure, especially because of the high-voltage scenes they filmed. Although critics were ruthless about the plot, audiences responded well at the box office. But the real shift in how he was perceived would come a year later, thanks to a cult director.

In 2016, Richard Linklater cast him in the lineup of Everybody Wants Some!!. It was his first real acting test.

Playing Kenny Roper under Linklater's direction required a naturalness that Guzman had not shown until then. The shoot relied on improvisation and group chemistry, far from the artifice of the major studios. That movie changed his standing among casting directors. He was no longer just the handsome guy who could fight or dance, but an actor capable of grasping the rhythm of a smart ensemble comedy.

And the risk paid off.

That same year, he appeared in Heroes Reborn playing Carlos Gutierrez. The series did not have the run it hoped for, but it let him explore science fiction and psychological drama. It was a period of technical learning in which he understood that television demanded far more brutal delivery schedules than independent film.

The Uniform's Stability

In 2018, his career found a safe harbor on network television. He joined the cast of 9-1-1 as firefighter Eddie Diaz, and since then his presence on Ryan Murphy has been constant. Diaz's character (a war veteran with a son who has cerebral palsy) has allowed him to explore dramatic nuances that action films consistently denied him.

The industry saw him as a body, but he was looking for something else.

During the show's filming in 2020, he had to face personal controversies on social media that tested his public resilience. But his character survived the scripts and outside criticism. In 2024, the production reached its seventh season while keeping solid ratings, which ensure the show's continuation on ABC after its run on Fox.

Away from the spotlight, Guzman keeps up his martial arts training and has started getting involved in producing short-form content. In 2021, his second daughter was born to his relationship with Samantha Pesce, though the couple later decided to split. The actor has said on several occasions that he prefers the security of a long TV contract to the uncertainty of big blockbusters. In 2025, his contract with the show remains in place for the eighth season of the emergency-services drama.