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I didn’t want to step into a shoot and not know how to properly execute it.”įaced with film offers he had no interest in taking and advertising job offers that he didn’t feel ready for, Ruell and his wife skipped town to Europe with a single intention: to build a photography portfolio. Ruell admits candidly that he wasn’t ready for it.
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He was suddenly pegged as a professional photographer and actor-both of which he had simply stumbled into. The photos he shot were everywhere and grabbed the attention of advertising agencies, which started contacting him to photograph upcoming campaigns. As there was no budget, Ruell volunteered, shooting stills of suburban absurdity with a tenderness that would become a hallmark of his later work. When a friend at BYU asked Ruell if he could help him out by acting in the feature film he was writing, Ruell said yes, with no thought as to where the film might go.ĭuring the course of Napoleon Dynamite’s production, it became apparent that directors Jared and Jerusha Hess would need production stills for publicity and festival submissions, like the Sundance Film Festival where Napoleon eventually ran. Raised as a Mormon, he went off to Brigham Young University’s Media Arts program in Utah, set on becoming a film director (though he continued to photograph and even assembled a darkroom in his dorm bathroom). Ruell began writing, shooting, and, yes, acting in short films in his spare time. His interactions with the camera inspired a second passion that would soon take over the first: filmmaking. Like many photographers, Ruell’s interest in the medium began after taking a high school photo class. But being in front of the camera was never Ruell’s passion-from an early age, he dreamed of a career on the other side of the lens. Such was the life of photographer and director Aaron Ruell, who starred as Napoleon’s brother, “Kip,” in the 2004 breakout film Napoleon Dynamite. Fast-forward a couple of years and suddenly you are the star of one of the biggest cult comedies of the last decade. Imagine that a college friend asks you for a favor: Act in his low-budget indie film.
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