Kynan Dias is an actor and award-winning screenwriter, born in Honolulu and raised in Las Vegas. Inspired at an early age by great American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, Kynan taught himself to write feature-length screenplays as a 14-year-old high school student. He earned a B.A. in film from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he pursued acting, screenwriting, and directing. Later, Kynan earned his MFA in screenwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he developed a love for writing TV sitcoms that were further nurtured during his time studying improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade.
As a writer, Kynan's films tend to live within the thin space between the humorous and the tragic, in sarcastic dramas and in comedies that hurt. As an actor, he is often hired to cry in comedies. With Lester Ryan Clark, Kynan co-hosts a series of film history podcasts on the TruStory.FM network that are meticulously researched yet lean heavily on improvised comedy.
Teaching at UNLV FILM since 2008, Kynan has developed a wide variety of courses in film production, directing, acting, screenwriting, and film studies, being especially proud of building classes such as Women in Comedy and Queer Cinema. His research interests include animation history, studio system economics, queer coding in classic film, and foregrounding previously unsung collaborators within major film authors' historiographies.
🌐 IMDb • Kynan Dias
We start Twain’s Chronicle of Young Satan — and Chapter 1 doesn’t even need its devil yet. A village that punishes goodness and rewards fear is already doing the work.
Twain’s Satan creates a village, kills everyone in it, wipes the clay on his handkerchief, and lists humanity’s faults with mild curiosity. His deepest contempt: the moral sense. File that away.
A bamboo branch becomes thirty objects, crayon wounds erupt in candy, and piñatas turn out to be originally Chinese—the Daniels probably didn’t know, which makes it so much better.
Mark Twain’s dark late period used Satan to say what he couldn’t otherwise. We start with a rated-G claymation — and the news that the book we assigned doesn’t quite exist
Jenny Slate’s elbow macaroni asks why God gave him a hole for no reason—we finally cover Spaghetti Baby Noodle Boy and find Evelyn’s first villain flicker hidden in her answer.
Foxy Waymond catches a multiverse-fried Evelyn in a Hong Kong alley—plus hot dog production design secrets, body-swap genre theory, and a moquette rabbit hole that somehow nails the film’s thesis.
Raccacoonie voiced by Randy Newman sends Evelyn fleeing into the hot dog universe—plus a Randy Newman dynasty deep dive and a serious debate about whether that scene is assault.
“THE END” appears—then we pull back to a movie theater, Wong Kar Wai Evelyn wakes alive, and sprints Cinderella-style for her daughter while every Evelyn feels something shift.
Jobu slow-claps, Evelyn vomits mid-transformation, and dies—plus applause semiotics, why Spider-Man never pukes using his powers, and what Jobu’s wistfulness actually signals.
What if the threat is already inside? Tommy curates a triple feature about invaders that don’t need to knock — they’re already in the town, in the body, in the mind. Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation (2018), Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), and Tarsem’s The Cell (2000) — three films, three decades, three very different ideas about what gets in, and what it costs to get it out.