Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
This Child Actor Is In Prison Now - The Ryan Grantham story
01 Feb 2025
Ryan Grantham is an actor on Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Riverdale, iZombie, and Falling Skies, who was attempting to murder Justin Trudeau.
Full Episode
If you remember the movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid, you probably remember this tree scene. Well, the child actor playing this bush here actually ends up murdering someone. It's crazy. Now, his name is Ryan. He's nine. He's from Squamish, British Columbia. And Ryan is young, but he already knows he wants to be an actor. So one day, he auditions for a commercial. And boom, he gets the part.
So he keeps going. And eventually, he gets a small role in a TV movie. And soon, he's in other movies and TV shows, and people are like, you're going places, kid. And a few years later, when he's around 12 years old, he lands a small role in the movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He's the kid who plays the bush in the school play. And it's a small role in a big movie, but this is a huge deal for him.
And so he just keeps acting, small roles here and there, and eventually, a couple years later, he gets a lead role in a movie. Hi, I'm Ryan Grantham, and I'm playing the role of Redwood. And so it feels like his acting career is finally getting traction. He gets a small role on a show called Falling Skies, and on another show called iZombie. Then he gets cast in two episodes of Supernatural.
Four years after that, he's cast in an episode of Riverdale. He told the police he did it to protect me, but it wasn't him. And that's all great for Ryan, but here's the thing about all this acting he's doing. He's working, he's getting roles here and there, some promising stuff, but he's not landing A-list parts like he wants. Like nothing is making him this famous movie star.
And this really starts to weigh on Ryan. And soon enough, he's really down about it. Like really down. Like he's battling with depression and it just sucks for him. And by the way, this is a really common thing with actors. They see making it as a big Hollywood star as the very definition of success, as opposed to just being a working actor who gets a lot of smaller roles here and there.
And so they, like Ryan, when they don't make it big time like Timothee Chalamet or whoever, they'll start to see themselves as a failure. Instead of seeing themselves as someone who is working a job doing something they really love, which a lot of people don't have the privilege of getting to do. Like, I personally think it's cool he was in Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Falling Skies and Riverdale.
Like, that's a cool little resume to me, especially at 21 years old. Like, that sounds like success to me, but I guess it doesn't to Ryan. So for whatever reason, Ryan doesn't tell anyone. He keeps it to himself and acts as if everything is okay. And around this time, he's going to college. And in college, he's having a really hard time there too.
He's bummed out and he's isolating himself and he starts having a lot of really dark thoughts. And apparently to combat all this, he gets really into alcohol and Zaza. Until, as things keep getting worse for Ryan, he starts spending more and more time online, specifically on the dark web, which can be a really messed up place.
And I guess he gets really into watching these like really violent videos. A lot of these videos are apparently of people being executed, like that's what he's consuming all day. And eventually Ryan gets into such a bad mental state, he just stops going to class. And all of this is putting him in a headspace where he wants to unalive himself.
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