Ryan Destiny Comes Into Her Own (2024)

“I want to be a part of projects that mean something,” says Ryan Destiny, who began acting as a teen. “Whether or not they win awards, I want to be a part of things that push the culture forward and touch people. I also would like to say that I want to keep my mindset on winning awards and all of that, but I don’t think that’s healthy.”

Healthy or not, the 29-year-old (of Lee Daniels’ Star and and of Black-ish spin-off Grown-ish fame) is sure to garner some buzz next awards season for her grounded yet dazzling performance in The Fire Inside, Amazon MGM Studio’s upcoming sports biopic. Directed by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison from a screenplay by Barry Jenkins, the film serves as Destiny’s silver-screen debut. “I’ve had roles before, but nothing where I had to actually carry a film,” Destiny says. “I had all these dreams of seeing myself in this way, on the big screen, so to actually see it unfold is very trippy.”

The Fire Inside tells the story of Claressa Shields, the first American female boxer to win a gold medal at the Olympics (and the first American boxer, male or female, ever to win gold in back-to-back Games). Shields, like Destiny, is from Michigan (Flint and Detroit, respectively), and Destiny was initially nervous about portraying a real person, especially one so close to home. “It was very nerve-racking,” she says. “The whole time I was filming, I was thinking about what Claressa would think. She’s not a person who sugarcoats what she says and how she feels, so I knew once she saw the film, she would tell me how she felt.” (Thankfully, Shields loved it: “I was so grateful for that, because she was in my brain the entire time,” Destiny says.)

Embodying the persona of a boxer was “not as easy as people would think,” she says. “I’m not the most out-there person; I’m more timid. I’m very confident, but I think a boxer’s confidence level is very different from that of a normal person.” And, of course, there was the physicality of it all. “I’m not necessarily a person who’s in the gym all the time,” Destiny says, laughing, “so it was a switch for me.” To prepare, she reached out to Michael B. Jordan, who put her in touch with Robert Sale, his trainer from the Creed films. “Rob is a textbook boxing trainer—the real deal,” Destiny says. The actor-trainer relationship she formed with Sale mirrored the athlete-coach bond she portrayed onscreen between Shields and her trainer Jason Crutchfield (played exquisitely by Brian Tyree Henry). “You get very attached to your trainer, and you feel like you need them every step of the way,” Destiny says. “It got a lot like that for me, which I didn’t see coming at all.”

Born in the home of Motown Records, Destiny followed in the footsteps of her father Deron Irons, of the ’90s R&B group Guesss, and got her start as part of the girl group New Limit. (Though the group has since disbanded, Destiny continues to release music as a solo artist.) Looking back on that time now, Destiny sees parallels between her experiences in the music industry and Shields’ plight. For example, in one scene, as a response to her lack of marketability compared to the other female athletes, Shields is told that she needs to “play the game”—code for softening her edges and being more marketable, which was something that Destiny could relate to. “As a person who has been in the industry since I was young, I’ve been almost trained to have this mindset of having to look or act a certain way in order to be accepted within this world. I’m just now starting to get out of that. You learn that stepping into a character that you’re not isn’t worth it.”

Now Destiny is stepping up as herself and reaping the rewards. As her career progresses, she intends to tell more heartfelt and purposeful stories like Shields’. “I’m going to stick to doing projects that I really love,” she says, “whether that be in the film world, in the TV world, or in music. I would love to be able to say that years down the line, I’m still doing really meaningful work and I didn’t stop. That’s a really big goal of mine: to not give up.”

Hair by Anton Alexander for Kérastase; makeup by Grace Ahn at Day One; manicure by Merrick Fisher and Naoko Saita at Opus Beauty; produced by Production Partners; photographed on location at The Hollywood Roosevelt.

A version of this article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of ELLE.

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