Can anyone believe that Rider Strong, Shaun from Boy Meets World in other words, is now 39 and directing? It’s true you want to go on and look. Wikipedia can give you give you the skinny on what he’s been doing for a while and a rundown of his accomplishments, as well as the awards he’s been nominated for and the one that he took home. But if you really want to know what he’s been doing from a personal standpoint IMDb gives a brief and pretty accurate accounting of what he’s done along with some interesting trivia that’s been accumulated throughout his career. Then again if you really want to see what the guy has been up to going to his Twitter page where he along with many others just let their thoughts roam from time to time.
It’s pretty easy to see that he hasn’t been idle since his time on Boy Meets World since he’s been growing in many ways as an actor, a producer, and a director throughout the years. His acting talents haven’t been put to the greatest test at times since he’s shown up in a lot of B-movies and TV films where not as much is expected, but you can give the guy props for sticking with show business and still being able to contribute when others that started out as kids have either burned out or given up at some point. There’s no doubt that show business is a cruel mistress at times and it hasn’t always been kind to kids, but some of them have at least been given the chance to excel without the business taking just about everything it can from them, and Rider is one of those. He’s done well enough to be counted as a success story that a lot of people might not hear about since he did kind of drop off the mainstream map for a while and even managed to find his way to college where he completed a Masters degree from Bennington College.
A lot of us likely remember him as the fun-loving character of Shawn since he was mainstay on the show Boy Meets World, but if you’ve ever seen Cabin Fever, a B-class horror movie about a bunch of college kids that contract a deadly disease while camping in the woods, you’d know that he has more than one act that has helped him throughout his career. Granted, he wasn’t the nicest person in Cabin Fever since he was eventually one of the last survivors before he too succumbed to the disease, but he did play the part he was given fairly well since you didn’t know whether to feel for the guy or just up and hate him without reservation. There was after all a moment when he was in the cabin getting busy with the last female survivor while another female friend was out in the shed dying as the skin fell off her bones. But aside from that little tidbit, his character was actually meant to be the nice guy.
Rider has been around now for a while and he shows no sign of going away, though he hasn’t done a motion picture, apart from TV, since 2013 it would seem. That could be due to his desire to direct and stay behind the camera a bit more since as a person and as a professional he has grown quite a bit throughout the years. This seems like a very natural progression for a lot of people in show business as they perfect their craft and then decide to take up the director’s chair to bring their experience to bear. If you ask a lot of actors what they see themselves doing in the future they might tell you that they want to direct, and so far a lot of them, those that have stuck around at least, would seem to be living that dream. Some people retire before it happens, some become disillusioned with show business, and then some just decide to walk a different path. But with a good number of actors it’s been seen that they do finally get their desire to sit behind the camera and dictate how things are going to go.
Looking back on his time as a younger actor it does seem kind of hard for some people to think that he might one day make the decision to direct, in fact some might have had trouble believing he might be a screenwriter too, but he’s done both so far in his career and has been enjoying it immensely it seems like. Plus, even better, he became a husband in 2013 and a father only a year later, so it would seem that his life has taken some interesting turns, but all for the better at this point.
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