Kyle Allen Answers The Hard Questions.

25-year-old Actor Kyle Allen’s current gig is Amazon’s The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. A story about a boy who relives the same day repeatedly. Next, he can be seen in Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated West Side Story. In the meantime, he’s asking himself the hard questions of what it means to be alive.

February 17th, 2021

words: Dio Anthony

Photography: Maarten de Boer

Styling: Chris Horan

Grooming: Barbara Guillaume

Kyle Allen: So, we’re here to talk about my movie. Yes—it is in fact a lot like Groundhog day.

Dio Anthony: Sure. However, much like Groundhog Day, I’m more interested in what day of your life, if given a choice, you’d choose to live over and over? 

Kyle Allen: You know..I’ve just had so many good days. I’d pick any of those. I think that's the problem. When you have a bunch of good days, you're like, gosh, I would repeat that one, but I would also repeat this one, but this one doesn't have that one in it…

Dio Anthony: How about when it comes to age? I’m obsessed with aging. Out of your 24 years, is there an age you'd choose to stay for the rest of your days? 

Kyle Allen: No, no, no. I think we're supposed to die. I have to get out of the way for the next generation. You know what I mean? I can’t keep taking up space in time.

Dio Anthony: That’s a very existential answer. I was not expecting that. 

Kyle Allen: Well these are good questions. I just want to answer them correctly. You know what I mean?

Dio Anthony: As a born and bred California boy, what place or thing do you consider to be quintessential California?

Kyle Allen: Off the top of my head, I think Arnold Schwartzenegger is ironically and phenomenally very California. 

Dio Anthony: Really? 

Kyle Allen: It's like, he’s a movie star governor who lives in Los Angeles.  Hung out at muscle beach. Came here from somewhere else. Which to me is very California. You know, it's tricky because there's a lot. I feel like if you went to San Francisco, Los Angeles and then also went to any beach or any mountain top… If you surfed and skied in the same day, that's pretty California. Not to mention places like Tahoe and Huntington beach, Malibu…

Dio Antony: At the photoshoot you danced in every frame. You’re a full on Dancer. I have to ask, have you seen Tiny Pretty Things? The Netflix series about a ballet school..

Kyle Allen: I avoided that entirely. 

Dio Antony: Why? You went to dance school, did it bring back memories? 

Kyle Allen: Dance school is very dramatic. It can get competitive. I wouldn't imagine that the TV show really gets into the fact that we're also exhausted. You're sore constantly, right? You have one day of recovery. At least I had one day of recovery on Sunday. We didn't have any classes on rest days, but we would still go to the studio sometimes to stretch and keep our bodies from seizing up. Then you do it again on Monday, and you're feeling good. But by the time it's Tuesday, you're sore again. And then you just compound the soreness for the rest of the week until Saturday. Then Saturday morning you have your class and rehearsals. It’s a cycle. They have a lot of drama in that show. I can tell they have a lot of shenanigans and things that people get up to. Things you actually don’t get to do, because you don’t have the time. Like, no one at my school had time to have an affair with the teacher.

Dio Anthony: So, you have watched it?

Kyle Allen: No. I haven’t, [laughs]. I was curious to see if I would be interested in watching. But you watch a couple of trailers and read some reviews and you kind of get what they're doing with the whole boarding school environment. But in school, everyone’s focus is dance. If you're gonna dedicate that much of your life to something like, there's not going to be a lot of extra things going on outside of your training. If you got caught drinking, you were kicked out of the school or you got suspended. If they found cigarettes anywhere near you, that wasn’t great either. You could leave the school during the weekends, but other than that, you were in that building training. I just think the depictions on the show are silly. 

Dio Anthony: The way they present it is “very dog-eat-dog”. Which makes for good television.

Kyle Allen: They definitely present it like that. I mean, in school, you’re a family. You’re all suffering together. The teachers are very unkind and brutal, and everyone lives together. You can't maintain that type of rocky relationship with people. There are people that would get in arguments and stuff, but it's unrealistic to stay mad or hold a grudge. You can't be mad at someone that long when you live together, right? You have to function together, you have to perform together. So, that's part of the training, it’s figuring out how to work with others. Cause’ traditionally you're going to go from that school, straight into a ballet company. Which is roughly the same thing.

Dio Anthony: Do you keep in touch with a lot of your friends from school that went on to these ballet companies?

Kyle Allen: Absolutely. Because of that I have friends all over the world. They’re family.

Dio Anthony: A little bit more on performing. So I know most auditions are pretty traditional. Therefore I always find it funny when actors are asked what their audition process was like? But I can't imagine your audition for West side Story being traditional…

Kyle Allen: [Laughs] It was non-traditional in that it was like a traditional Broadway dance call. Which I imagine they probably did for films like The Greatest Showman and In The Heights. I imagine they did something similar. I'm not sure though. But for ours I was lucky enough to go straight to the callback. I think just from my experience with some of the people working in the casting part of things…

**Something Falls on the ground on Kyle’s end of the call—making a very loud noise.**

Kyle Allen: I have no idea how that happened.

Dio Anthony: What was that? What’d you drop?

Kyle Allen: I didn't drop anything. I turned my head and something fell off from my desk. I'm like, literally three feet away from it. That was weird. It was a piece of Sinker Cypress that my friend gave to me while I was filming a movie called All My Life in New Orleans. It's a very special type of wood. It was being held up by one of those model hands that people use for drawing references. That’s what I use them for at least. When drawing hands.

Dio Anthony: Are you a sketch artist?

Kyle Allen: Yeah. I'm sitting in front of my drafting table right now.

Dio Anthony: What kind of stuff are you drawing now? I draw as well.

Kyle Allen: I’m currently making a couple of comic books. I won't draw the complete pages, but I'll draw rough drafts of the pages—to get the idea onto paper. I’m also working on this piece that I can only describe as graphite surrealism? I don't know what you would call it really. I like to draw these monsters with flowers coming out of their mouths and people with crazy hair, holding weapons. There's this really fantastic artists that I’m currently super into that inspired this. I'm going to look them up right now. I'm right in front of my computer. This won't take much time. I promise. 

Dio Anthony: I’m glad that piece of wood fell. I had no idea.

Kyle Allen: Okay. I guess I have no internet. The page isn’t loading. Well, there's this phenomenal artist that my friend and colleague introduced me to. She does these sigils for people. If they’re struggling with addiction or if they come from an abusive family or something like that. She uses her art style to create really beautiful depictions of these dark scenarios to protect you through difficult times. She uses symbolism to create somewhat of a protective sigil. Almost like this magical force field that wards off those particular things depicted within the art. I kind of took that and ran with it. So i’ve been using a lot of symbolism and things like that in my own work. It’s kind of like, if you took high fantasy and blended it with mendola art. I usually draw these heavily detailed scenes from from worlds that I invent.

Dio Anthony: Outside of that, are you a big comic book fan?

Kyle Allen: I wouldn't call myself a traditional comic book fan. But more of art fan. I won't buy every issue of something. I'll buy the issues that I want to look at. I'll read through the whole story, but, I'm not going to own every issue of something. I wouldn't call myself a collector.

Dio Anthony: Better said—- a graphic novel fan?

Kyle Allen: There you go. I think I'm a much bigger graphic novel fan. I have much more of those than I do Individual comic books.

Dio Anthony: Have you read Ghost World?

Kyle Allen: I have not read Ghost World. I've been working my way through East of West. As well as my favorite series, the Bone comics. I’ve read those multiple times. I Loved those to death. Those I collected three of. I just absolutely love the art in it. It's magical.

Dio Anthony: I’m wondering if you’d be into Daniel Clowes’ art. He wrote and drew Ghost World. It might not be your vibe, but it's definitely something worth looking at. He has a lot of different graphic novels and they dive into deep subjects.

Kyle Allen: Definitely. Yeah, I’d be interested.

Dio Anthony: What’s the last thing you've read on your phone screen for more than 20 minutes?

Kyle Allen: Last thing I read on my phone screen was a script for a movie that I'm doing in Atlanta in a month and a half.

Dio Anthony: A Very actor answer.

Kyle Allen: Yeah. [laughs]. I mean, that's the truth! 

Dio Anthony: What’s the last thing you Googled?

Kyle Allen: Headless Roman gladiator skeletons identified, but I didn't write that. I think I wrote “unmarked gladiator graves”.

Dio Anthony: Was that a scene reference for something you were going to draw?

Kyle Allen: No, no. In another interview I was asked: What historical figure I identified with most. And I was like, probably one of those gladiators from history. Probably one of those unmarked graves. There's these gladiators, you've no idea who they are, or their lineage. They’re just in the ground. We just know that they’re gladiators.

Dio Anthony: Well, that's interesting.

Kyle Allen: That’s just how I feel. I'm not a guy who's going to tell you I really identify with DaVinci or Abraham Lincoln. Most men in history are, you know, misogynistic. We just didn't know Jack about anything. Society as a whole. It's been so terrible for so long. I don't identify with any of those people. I know better than to give my kids cigarettes or have women be legally defined as property. No, I don't identify with any of those men from history.

Dio Anthony: Well, now I have to ask, why do you identify with these gladiators?

Kyle Allen: I think that's something that I have to really get into myself. I kind of answered it really quickly at the time, in my head and then took the time to research them. I think that's how I feel. I think the people you hear about in history, I don't know what to make of it. You know, they're all recordings of things.  It's hard, especially now to really discern what actually happened. But I can look around me and see that there's incredible people just walking down the street or, you know, doing everyday things. All the little things that make the world work. And I know that there was people like that back then. And one of them was probably just swept up in some ridiculous thing that I guess eventually killed them.  I think when I'm done, like when I'm dead, I kind of hope people just forget and move on.

Dio Anthony: Wait, that's a little sad.

Kyle Allen: Yeah. But it's also real. It's a little sad, but the majority of the billions and billions of people that existed on this planet, we have no idea about them. And to be honest, the people that we do remember, we don't know anything about them. We don't know the extent. We're still finding out publicly.There's a lot we know about George Washington, but we're still finding out. No, he wasn’t the greatest person ever. Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he didn't have interest in freeing slaves. He had a different agenda that happened to be the emancipation. But that wasn't his goal. He wasn't like, yeah, liberate black people. So, I think it's just the truth. And I think I want to be honest. I'm going to die and people are going to forget me. The purest embodiment of that is a slave turned into a gladiator and then buried in an unmarked grave. You dig them up centuries later and learn something about their bones. To me, that's the human experience.

Dio Anthony: That’s a refreshing take on it. It kind of reminds me of this thought that I have of how, you know, these really old figures, for example—Marie Antoinette. We don't see photos of her. We just see these paintings. I always think. What’d she actually look like?

Kyle Allen: Right. If you've ever been to a photo shoot, it takes a couple of hours—you're just hanging out. It’s very direct.

Dio Anthony: Whereas these people, Marie for example—she’s being painted in a really good light. It wasn't a photograph. That's the interesting part. We really don't know the extent of even their whole physicality by a painting. An artist was paid commissioned to paint them… We’re getting deep. Is there a film you watched as a kid, that caused some type of shift in you?

Kyle Allen: I Have a lot of those moments. I would say the most memorable would be a movie I watched called the 100 Foot Journey. I think I was 18 when it came out. Manish Dayal plays a character who becomes this great chef, overcomes ridiculous odds and gets swept away into the highlife. He forgets who he is and where he comes from for a bit. Then there's this moment where he's working late at night in the kitchen, all by himself in this state-of-the-art kitchen. There’s a custodian cleaning up and the custodian stops to eat his lunch. He’s having this traditional Indian food, the kind that Manish’s character grew up on. He goes over and asks for some, and I just watched him in that moment completely. You see his soul erupt and you see all of his memories coming back to him and who he is coming back to him. It was just the most amazing movie for me at that time. I’ve always remembered that. I remember I was in LA and I was really depressed at the time. I was wrestling with the question of what’s the point? What's the point of making movies? Like, what is it? And I couldn't define it. I was really upset because it was something that I wanted to do, but I just didn't see how it added to the world in a meaningful way. It felt like someone reached into my soul and was like, you're not alone. After I saw that film, I was like, no one can tell me that this doesn't matter. That scene was such a gift. What we actually gain from creating and sharing stories is really, at least for me, it goes beyond definition. I think we're still trying to learn it, but I feel like it's at the forefront of the human experience. Movie making, it challenges iand makes us grow sometimes in all these really unique ways. It's a bizarre world. It's such a bizarre experiment— movie making and cinema. It's so crazy when you think about it. But it has an innocent and explicable value to me. Good, God, I talk so much.

Dio Anthony: Is that the conclusion you came to? Of why it acting mattered? 

Kyle Allen: It mattered to me that no one could take that away from me. No one could tell me I didn't have that experience. I had that experience. I walked out of that theater, a different person and in a different way. And that change happened because of that movie. And because of that performance, my life was now better. Period. I walked out of that theater and was like, if I can do that for someone else, then it's worth it.

Dio Anthony: Wow. I couldn’t agree more, honestly. Making movies is a bizarre thing. Experiencing them is something even crazier and harder to explain when a film, or character has really touched you. What’s the last song you’ve listened to?

Kyle Allen: The last song I listened to? Oh, it's not going to be good. Dang it. Well, so what I do is I'll take a break from all the music that I love and I'll listen to  the global viral, top 50 on Spotify, because it fascinates me to hear what the world is listening to most. But I'd rather not even say the name of that song. The name of the song I would love to say is Sugar Honey Iced Tea by Princess Nokia. That is the best song I’ve listened to pretty nonstop. And that's a song that I would want to talk about. She’s freaking fantastic.

Dio Anthony: That’s so interesting to me. I checked out what everyone was listening to on Spotify the other day as well. I think it was the top billboard charts songs or something similar. And I was surprised to learn that besides Olivia Rodrigo's Driver's License, I just didn't know any of the songs.

Kyle Allen: Yeah. So quite a large handful of them are ones that I have heard of. I don’t have a Tik Tok, but on Instagram, people like to post them. And so they're songs that people use in Tik Toks. Most of the global songs that I’ve witnessed are all things that people use when they're making Tik Toks. And I'm like, Oh, that's where that tune came from.

Dio Anthony: This is actually a perfect follow-up question. What's your favorite thing on the internet right now?

Kyle Allen: Man, that's a great question.

Dio Anthony: There are just so many little pockets of communities on the internet. It's really interesting to me.

Kyle Allen: Yeah. So my favorite thing I think on the internet right now is… this game I’ve been playing called Overwatch. I just needed a break, so I loaded that up and I was playing for a while. There's this button that allows you to team up with a bunch of random people before you queue for the next game. I thought, alright, whatever. I did it and I searched for a group of people and this random group of people showed up. One had a voice modulator and was in character this entire time. I’m not kidding you, they were doing a depiction from Transformers, I think it was Soundwave. If you referred to him as anything other than Soundwave, he would yell at you. Him and I, we became best friends. There was another person from New Zealand. She was really cool. There was this other guy who I initially didn’t talk much with because he was more of a quiet type. But then we just ended up talking for nearly three hours about nonsense. Just this random group of people. It was so much fun. We didn't even play the game. We just sat there and chatted about about life. It was delightful.

Dio Anthony: You’re so full of surprises. You're about to turn 25 next month, right?

Kyle Allen: I sure am. 

Dio Anthony: How do you feel going into your 25th birthday? I know a lot of people make a big deal out of turning 25. I think it makes other people think they should feel some particular way as well. Something tells me you’re not the type...

Kyle Allen: I gotta be perfectly honest with you. I don't really pay attention to time in that sense. Like, I'm very aware that we invented the measurements we come up with for how we deal with the fact that we don't know what's happening. We don't know why things seem to be progressing through this thing that we call time. I don't know. It's weird to be like, this is how old I am. It doesn’t matter. Can you accomplish the tasks that you're supposed to in your lifetime? Yes or no? That's the only thing that should matter. So, I don't know. I think about that sort of thing a lot, but I don't feel any one way about birthdays or getting older. I’ll use it as an excuse to hang out with friends.

Dio Anthony: This was a very memorable conversation. It was not at all what I expected it to be. Which should teach me to not have expectations. 

Kyle Allen: You touched on some concepts that I think a lot about. And then I just get really excited about talking about them.

Dio Anthony: I’m glad. I'm glad it wasn't just us talking about the film and your character’s motivations for 35 minutes.

Kyle Allen: Oh God, no. Hopefully you can find some kind of discernible something from this

Dio Anthony: Absolutely. I’ll talk to you later. Maybe?

Kyle Allen: Brilliant.