Hoyt Richards is award-winning actor/writer/filmmaker and Founder/CEO of Tortoise Entertainment.
Originally from the main line area outside of 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 the Ford and Wilhelmina agencies and is considered 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, Hoyt moved from New York to Los Angeles where he began working as an actor and now has over thirty 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 the gym was theatrically released in 2014. His latest project, Intersection, a psychological, romantic thriller was theatrically released in 2018.
Currently, Hoyt is filming a docuseries that chronicles his twenty-year journey into the Eternal Values religious cult and his subsequent escape and recovery. Simultaneously, he is writing a book, Seemed Like a Great Idea at the Time, which catalogs his journey through the cult years and after while living a double life as one of the world’s top fashion models.
Hoyt speaks publicly about the dangers and the lessons learned from his experience in a cultic and abusive environment. He also assists families and individuals who have loved ones caught in cultic situations.