As kids, Jake Allyn and his brother Conor ran around their Preston Hollow neighborhood in Dallas, shooting movies with their father’s camcorder. Conor, who is older by four years, usually directed his sibling in what must have been action-packed thrillers. “I always say I started in stunts,” Jake says. “I was usually getting blown up or knifed or shot or thrown out of a tree or something very dangerous that you would only have your little brother do.”
The Allyn brothers have turned their childhood antics into Hollywood ambitions with Margate House Films, a production company they run with their dad, Rob, that’s named after the street where they grew up.
The younger Allyn, now 33, is still willing to put his body on the line for a scene—and does so in his new movie, Ride, playing a bull rider struggling with addiction. The film, which Allyn wrote and directed (his brother and father are producers), is set in Stephenville, the town 68 miles southwest of Fort Worth that’s known as the cowboy capital of the world (though Hill Country’s Bandera holds an official title).
Ride follows three generations of bull riders—Peter Hawkins (played by Allyn); his father, John (C. Thomas Howell); and his grandfather Al (Forrie J. Smith, of Yellowstone fame)—as they struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction while seeking care for Peter’s younger sister, who has cancer. It’s equal parts family drama, crime thriller, and rodeo action. If you love Yellowstone, you’ll likely get a kick out of Ride.
Allyn spoke via Zoom from Nashville, where he lives, about growing up in Texas, being a part of the current cowboy craze, and riding real bulls at live rodeos for the film, which hits theaters June 14.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Texas Monthly: You attended Cornell, where you played football. Did you play growing up in Texas?
Jake Allyn: Yeah, it was one of the things that got me interested in storytelling. When I saw the movie Friday Night Lights, I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s a movie about me and my world and people that I know and people around Texas.” Friday Night Lights became my north star. Ride is one hundred percent my attempt at making the Friday Night Lights of rodeo.
TM: You switched to acting while in college.
JA: Switched, by the way, is a very polite way of saying the NFL wasn’t interested in me.
TM: Was there a moment when you knew acting would be part of your future?
JA: It was my sophomore or junior year of college, and I’d had a lot of back injuries from football. The sport had been my whole life, going back to Texas. I was always Jake Allyn the football player, and I was proud of that. I knew my time playing was coming to an end, and I thought to myself, “You’re going to have a big ol’ hole right where your heart is. You better start looking for what’s going to fill it.” I stepped into an acting class, and we started doing a scene and I immediately got the same rush, the same feelings that I got while playing football.
TM: Was Ride always going to be set in Texas, and in Stephenville specifically? What about the town inspired this story?
JA: It was always going to be in Texas. But Stephenville wasn’t a place that I knew much about until I went there on a research trip for this movie. I drove in and I saw the welcome sign of Stephenville, which had “The Cowboy Capital of the World” written on it. The sign was bent over, rusted. It looked like a bull rider desperately hanging on to a ride. That was the whole movie in one moment, and I knew, “This is the place; this is the spot.”
When this story started to take shape, I knew how important it was to me. I want to honor the cowboy, and I want to honor rodeo as a sport and way of life. But what I really want to do is show it honestly, the good and the bad. You know, even down to the cowboy hats and the boots and how the jeans would be tucked. And why isn’t there a dip ring in the guy’s back pocket? Once I knew that I loved this story on that microscopic level, that was when I was like, “Okay, maybe it’s selfish, maybe it’s egotistical me, but I can’t let anybody else direct this movie.”
TM: Ride is coming out amid a resurgence of cowboy culture in pop culture, such as the show Yellowstone and Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter.
JA: I’ll admit it: if there’s no Yellowstone, I don’t know if there’s a Ride. I wrote the first draft before Yellowstone came out, but would I have gotten financing to make a film about what was then seen as a niche community? I thank the Taylor Sheridans and Kevin Costners of the world for paving the way to be able to tell more of these stories.
TM: This isn’t your first Texas film. The 2020 No Man’s Land, directed by your brother and starring you and George Lopez, addressed the border and immigration. Ride sets its sights on drug addiction and health-care costs. Why incorporate these issues into the story?
JA: I started working on the script eight years ago. A lot happened during that time, and sometimes it would lead me to change the script. The youngest daughter of the Hawkins family has cancer, and the family is trying to move her to a better clinic. As that part of the story was evolving, COVID happened. As you can imagine, as an actor, I wasn’t getting a lot of work. The Screen Actors Guild took away my insurance. It was devastating, and I remember thinking in that moment I should reread Ride right now. So, I did, and I decided to change the whole movie. What would C. Thomas Howell’s character do when he’s worked hard his whole life only to be told by a cancer treatment clinic, “Sorry, you don’t have the money”?
TM: The rodeo scenes are thrilling. Did you actually ride those bulls?
JA: Yeah, I did a lot of that.
TM: What was your first time like?
JA: I got tossed. I trained for four days straight to get immediately tossed. But I got back up and was a little better the next time and the next time. I remember landing on my hip so hard one time it went numb for a month. All that training and practicing got me ready to do the scenes, but more so than that, it just gave me confidence to walk. I know it sounds crazy. You’re shooting at a live rodeo, with five hundred people and real cowboys and real bull riders sitting in their chutes, chewing tobacco and watching you as if saying, “All right, actor boy.” Just walking from the back of the arena to the shoot is like—you better walk the walk.
I always knew that we were going to shoot at a live rodeo. There’s no escaping that environment. It’s put up or shut up. That was a huge part in hiring C. Thomas Howell and Forrie J. Smith, both former cowboys, both former bull riders specifically. I’m so proud of those scenes because not only do I just love the way they turned out, but because there wasn’t any rehearsal, there’s no blocking. None of those scenes was the tenth take. There was rarely a second or third take.
TM: Ride recently won the audience award at the Dallas International Film Festival. How did it feel to win that award in your hometown?
JA: There’s something special about winning the audience award, you know. Because at the end of the day, that’s who you make movies for. And the cowboy community has so far flung their arms around this movie, whether it be because they’re rodeo people or not.
We did a premiere at the Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth the other week. Showing a rodeo movie inside a rodeo arena—as you can imagine, those rodeo scenes specifically felt very special. After the movie, this older cowboy—he was wearing a hat, belt buckle, starched jeans, the whole nine yards—makes a beeline to me, practically pushed people out of the way. He said, “I have to shake your hand, man; that movie really meant something to me.” I said, “Thank you; did you bull ride? Tell me your story, sir.” He digs in his pocket and pulls out a two-year sobriety chip. And he didn’t want to talk about cowboying. He didn’t want to talk about rodeo. He didn’t want to talk about Stephenville. He wanted to talk about his sobriety and how much he appreciated seeing a story about people, men in particular, coming together and taking that first step that first day. That first day is the hardest. And that, for me, was like, “Ah, that’s everything.”
