The most powerful movement I could inspire would be to encourage people to be a little more present. Just that. Try to be more present in your day, whenever you can.” — Wyatt Russell
I recently had the chance to chat with Wyatt Hawn Russell. Wyatt born in Los Angeles, California, is an American actor and former professional ice hockey player. The son of actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Russell was raised in a high-profile family with deep ties to Hollywood. He is also the grandson of character actor Bing Russell and the half-brother of actors Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Boston Russell. Despite his strong family connection to the entertainment industry, Russell’s early passion was not acting but hockey, a sport he pursued professionally before transitioning to acting after injuries cut his athletic career short.
Russell’s upbringing was marked by his love for ice hockey. Growing up in Los Angeles, he played the sport from a young age and developed the skills to become a goaltender for several amateur and professional teams. His journey took him across North America and even to Europe, where he played for teams such as the Richmond Sockeyes, Langley Hornets, Coquitlam Express, Chicago Steel, Brampton Capitals, and Groningen Grizzlies. He also played college hockey for the University of Alabama’s Chargers. However, injuries sidelined him in 2010, prompting him to rethink his career path. Hockey, he has said, was central to shaping his work ethic and discipline, attributes he later brought into his acting career.
With hockey behind him, Russell began acting in earnest, a decision he approached with the same dedication he had applied to sports. Although acting had long been part of his family’s world, it was a new arena for Russell. Early in his acting career, he appeared in films such as Cowboys & Aliens (2011), This Is 40 (2012), and 22 Jump Street (2014). He began to gain more attention for his performances in indie films and offbeat roles, often playing characters who existed on the fringes of mainstream success.
One of his notable early projects was the film Folk Hero & Funny Guy (2016), in which he co-starred, showcasing his versatility as an actor. His performance in an episode of Black Mirror titled “Playtest” (2016) also highlighted his ability to handle darker, more psychological material. These projects paved the way for bigger roles, leading to his standout performance in the 2018 film Overlord, a World War II-set horror movie directed by Julius Avery, in which he played Corporal Lewis Ford. His portrayal of a gritty, haunted soldier earned him critical praise and broadened his exposure in Hollywood.
In 2021, Russell took on the role of John Walker, a controversial character who eventually becomes the U.S. Agent, in Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. His portrayal of Walker, a conflicted and morally ambiguous figure within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), sparked significant debate among fans and showcased Russell’s ability to handle complex roles within large-scale franchises. He is set to reprise the role in the 2025 film Thunderbolts, signaling his continued involvement in the MCU.
Beyond the superhero genre, Russell has diversified his acting portfolio. In 2022, he portrayed Dan Lafferty, a real-life murderer, in the FX miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven, once again stepping into dark and challenging territory. Later that year, he joined his father, Kurt Russell, in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, an Apple TV+ series set in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, a franchise centered around iconic movie monsters like Godzilla.
Russell continues to balance his acting career with various personal interests. His upbringing, divided between Los Angeles and Vancouver, as well as family trips to a lake in Muskoka, Ontario, where they spent time away from the limelight, deeply influenced his sense of balance between work and personal life. This connection to nature and family time has been reflected in his lifestyle brand Lake Hour, a project he co-founded that focuses on the joys of unplugging and connecting with loved ones.
Despite his Hollywood lineage, Russell’s career has been marked by a determination to forge his own path, whether in hockey, acting, or entrepreneurship. His roles often reflect a willingness to explore complicated, nuanced characters, a trait that has become a hallmark of his work.
Yitzi: Wyatt, it’s a delight and an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep, our readers would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up?
Wyatt: I had a really great childhood. I was incredibly lucky to have my parents, my brother, and my sisters. We were all super close, kind of like the Brady Bunch. My brother and sister are from my mom’s first marriage, and my other brother, Boston, is from my dad’s first marriage. Then my parents had me, and despite the mix, we were as close as can be, a true Brady Bunch scenario. I lived in LA until I was 15 and played hockey, which was my passion. At 15, we moved to Vancouver, Canada, to pursue hockey more seriously. My parents lived with me there for about a year and a half. After that, I moved around a lot, living in places like Toronto, Vancouver again, Colorado, Alabama, and even Germany and Holland for a few years to play professional hockey. Vancouver felt like home for a long time. But every summer, we would vacation north of Toronto in Muskoka, on Lake Rosso. That was a significant part of my childhood, living on a lake there.
When my hockey career ended, I got into acting, which is sort of like the family business. People had always suggested I try acting, but I didn’t see myself as an actor, only as a hockey player. After getting hurt, I had some footage from doing favors for friends and decided to approach acting with the same dedication I had for hockey. I was completely new to acting, which might sound odd given my background. I didn’t know much about it and hadn’t been very involved with it. However, I didn’t feel uncomfortable in front of the camera. I’m not naturally an attention-seeking person, so learning to be front and center was a transition. It was a process, but now at 37, I realize that you do things your own way and learn in your own style. I’ve enjoyed the journey, and here I am.
Yitzi: You probably have some amazing stories from the varied tapestry of your career so far. Maybe this is hard to boil down. Can you share with our readers one or two of your favorite memories or favorite anecdotes?
Wyatt: Oh my God, boiling down to a single memory is hard. The first ones that come to mind are my earliest memories of playing hockey and skating. It was a significant experience, a core memory for me. I knew from that moment, this was what I wanted to do. So, I dedicated my life to it. It was everything to me. I can remember the exact day, the benches I would sit on, the skates, everything about it. The skates even had a little red letter 10 on the side; they were double-layered. My dad bought them from the skate rental place, seeing how much I loved it, and that set me off on that path. Hockey really made me who I am, teaching me about hard work and perseverance. It’s like the saying, “You can take the boy out of hockey, but you can’t take the hockey out of the boy.”
Moving a lot was also a significant part of my life. I was always the new kid, which was challenging since people knew who I was through my parents. These transitions have really helped me become a relatively well-adjusted person, comfortable in new situations, or at least understand that uncomfortable situations are temporary. So, in a broader sense, those are two things that have significantly shaped who I am. It’s tough to pick one or two specific anecdotes, but overall, these experiences have molded me.
Yitzi: I imagine that the lake house in your childhood was significant. Can you share with us a story of the real-life lake house, something that was memorable that happened there?
Wyatt: The concept of Lake Hour was born from living on the lake. In our lake house, just outside of Toronto, we’d turn our phones off and there was no TV. It was all about spending quality time with family and friends, really focused time. This kind of focused time is something you can’t get just anywhere. Lake life offers that to people; it’s inherent. If you take three days and go to a lake, turning your phone off, it feels like you’ve spent three weeks with those people. You get so much more out of life. My partner, Rich, grew up on a lake in Western New York, Lake Canisha, and it was so inherent to who we were. Lake Hour is about the time you spend with the people you love, which inspired the name. It’s always a good time for a Lake Hour.
Yitzi: You’re not a typical entrepreneur; you have these fascinating experiences behind you. I imagine each of them was very influential. Being a hockey player probably has a lot of relevance to hustling in business. And being a successful actor also must have had a lot of influence. Do you have any insights on how being a successful actor laid a good foundation for starting a business?
Wyatt: Definitely. I’d say hockey was more influential in how I approach business. There’s no way to get around hard work in hockey. You can’t be successful without working hard. It’s impossible. That involved getting up at 5:45 or even four o’clock in the morning sometimes when you’re seven years old to go to practice. It was something that taught me there’s no other option but to work hard. So, if you didn’t want to, you weren’t going to make it anywhere. You could play and have fun, but after that, it was over. And fighting through those moments of just thinking, “I hate this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be here right now. It’s not fun.” You have to work through those moments to reach the other side, to achieve some form of victory or win, or to advance in your career and get those little wins. You have to work through really hard moments where you just do not want to be there. You don’t want to wake up, you don’t want to answer emails, you don’t want to talk to distributors, you don’t want to travel for meetings, but inevitably, grinding through it and continuing to find the fun in the grind is what professional sports are about. That’s why those athletes are there. And that’s what entrepreneurs are about. That’s why they’re there. Every entrepreneur has that story. No one became a true entrepreneur and just had success magically happen. It doesn’t work like that.
On the acting side of things, what becomes disingenuous in the industry is when actors move into another space, like selling drinks or launching a product. A lot of times, actors work very hard, long hours, but that doesn’t mean magic can’t happen. There are people out there who probably don’t work as hard, yet things happen for them. I believe you can’t achieve success by doing nothing, but the dynamics in film and TV are different. The reason people watch someone and they become popular isn’t necessarily because they’re hard workers. It involves many other factors. So, when actors enter other industries, sometimes consumers can see through it. They might think, “Well, you’re just holding a beer or a tequila or a vodka.” It’s not about spending every hour of every day going to tastings in Atlanta, Georgia, or Lake Oconee, or coming to Sea Island, Georgia to meet with liquor reps and head buyers. For me, it’s fun because I enjoy the grind and meeting new people, but it’s not something many celebrities want to do since their time is precious, and I totally understand that. So, they don’t actually run the companies.
Where it differs for us, with Rich and me — Rich is in the same boat, producing commercials, television shows, and movies — is that we’re busy, but we only know one way to do things. So, when we got into this, it was clear we had to run the company together. We weren’t going to find someone, raise a bunch of money, and then do nothing but hold the drink and sell it on Instagram. We couldn’t do that. At the end of the day, what sets us apart is our work ethic, trying to truly get this out there and done, more as true entrepreneurs than as celebrities holding a can.
Yitzi: That’s awesome. One thing I notice is that, although you are a celebrity, your celebrity status isn’t front and center on the products you’re selling. It’s more behind the scenes. You come across as just one of the guys.
Wyatt: Yeah, and that’s by design. A lot of the liquor brands out there with celebrity endorsements, if you remove the celebrity from the brand, what do you have left? What is it? We love the brand and the story of Lake Hours so much that we want them to be synonymous with the experiences of the people who enjoy it, not ours. The inception of it is based on our experiences, and we want to share that with others. But it’s not me that’s going to make you like something. It’s about you loving the story, the vibe, the feel, and finding it authentic, but also loving the taste of the drink. That has to stand on its own. The branding has to speak for itself, or else, if you take me and Rich away, what do you have? You might not have much of anything. So, we thought it was really important not to build what we call an upside-down triangle, where everything is dependent on the celebrity. Remove the celebrity, and everything folds and topples over. It’s more work this way, but because we love the brand and the story of what it can mean to other people, we find it worth it. Everybody’s got a lake story. Everyone’s been to a lake or knows what being around a lake or a lake cabin feels like. It’s so accessible that we’d rather have people attach their own stories to it instead of trying to transplant ours onto someone else.
Yitzi: I love that. It sounds like for you, the lifestyle brand aspect is primary, focusing on being disconnected from technology and connected to your friends and loved ones. That’s the main thing. And this is one way to achieve that. But it seems like this could extend to other activities that promote this kind of lifestyle, maybe camping or other experiences that encourage disconnecting and connecting with each other.
Wyatt: Exactly. Lakes are synonymous with activities like camping and being outdoors, experiencing life in a fun, real, and present way. That’s the kind of energy around lakes. So, beyond just the lake, we want to convey with Lake Hour that the lake lifestyle can come to you, whether that’s a rooftop party, a backyard barbecue, or even in your basement. The lake can be anywhere. That’s where we’ve thought it could be really fun to push the branding in that direction.
Yitzi: Okay, amazing. I kind of sense the humor behind the brand. Like on your website, you say that it’s dad-bod resistant. As a dad myself, I relate to that. Is that your humor?
Wyatt: Yeah, that’s our humor. Everything you see, if it makes you laugh, we’re all for it. It’s true, you know? We were all about enjoying our IPAs, and then suddenly you’re 37 with two kids, thinking, “Oh no, after the third IPA, I’ll be too hungover to change diapers or take my kid fishing.” We avoid sugar, artificial sweeteners, and anything fake. It’s all real liquor, not malt, so it’s very clean. This means you can enjoy a few without feeling jittery or dealing with a sugar overload. You don’t end up with a terrible hangover because there aren’t crazy amounts of sugar or unaccounted ingredients like in malt drinks. Plus, at only 109 calories, you can enjoy a few without feeling bloated or full. They’re easy to drink, taste good, and are subtly flavored without being overly sweet. We use real pure cane sugar because we want to avoid artificial ingredients. The fake stuff just isn’t good for you or tasty.
Yitzi: Can you recommend to our readers some suggestions about how to live the Lake Hour lifestyle? How to live more connected to each other?
Wyatt: Absolutely. It all boils down to living in the moment, being present. And this doesn’t have to be tied to any specific location. You can embrace this lifestyle anywhere you are, whether you’re at the beach, at the park, or enjoying a rooftop grill and barbecue. It’s about being present, having a good laugh, and truly enjoying your life and the time you have. That’s the essence of what we’re trying to convey. When someone picks up a can or a case of Lake Hour at a store or bar, we want them to feel this sense of presence. It’s not about being trendy or cool for the moment; it’s about something we hope will last a long time. Presence is something you can’t buy or tell someone to have, but it’s something you can experience and feel. That’s our aim with Lake Hour.
Yitzi: Do you think that we could ever put the genie back into the bottle?
Wyatt: No, I don’t think we can. We’re from a generation that experienced life before smartphones, so we have reference points for being more mindful. But for our kids, it’s a different story. They need to learn to put down their phones and disconnect regularly. We’ve all gotten used to scrolling through Instagram and doom scrolling. We’re not going back to a simpler time, like a nostalgic version of the 1950s we might have in our heads. We have to live for now and do the best we can.
Every once in a while, finding whatever meditative experience works for you is essential, whether it’s sitting down with a drink of your choice or just being present in the moment without worrying about the future. Trying to eliminate the “what ifs” as much as possible is crucial because they only add stress and anxiety. You can’t escape technology entirely, but you can try to unplug for just 15–20 minutes a day, even though it might seem difficult. We get these devices that are supposed to make our lives easier, but sometimes they just make us work more. Sometimes, you have to discipline yourself to put down your phone and not do anything for the next 20 minutes, choosing instead to be with your kids.
Yitzi: That’s great. Okay. This is our signature question that we ask in all of our interviews. So you’ve been blessed with a lot of success now. For someone also considering creating a lifestyle brand or a beverage brand, can you share five things you need to create a successful spirit or beverage brand?
Wyatt: Firstly, work ethic is absolutely crucial. I know it’s a common sentiment, but it really is number one. You have to be willing to put in the effort and dedication necessary for success.
Secondly, being open and willing to learn is key. You need to keep your ears open and be eager to learn from those who have more experience, have done this before you, and are experts in their fields.
Third, you must be actionable. It’s essential to take the knowledge you’ve gained and turn it into actionable goals. This step transforms ideas into reality.
Fourth, being responsible with your finances and those of others is critical. We don’t have investors at the moment, but we aim to be responsible with investors’ money if and when that time comes.
Lastly, managing your stress is vital. Entrepreneurship is a grind, and if you don’t learn to manage your stress effectively, it can negatively impact every aspect of your life, including your business and family. These elements are interconnected, and failing to manage stress can have a snowball effect, leading to further issues.
Yitzi: Can you share with our readers some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart thrive?
Wyatt: Making time for my family is at the top of my list. Despite it always feeling like it’s never enough, I prioritize this above all. Occasionally, I take a moment for myself, maybe a bath or a steam, something that feels like a personal indulgence. I work a lot, but when I’m not working, I focus on what matters most. My happiest moments are when I’m with my wife and kids, with all distractions turned off. That’s my number one. Being able to incorporate family time into my routine is crucial for me.
Another aspect is managing finances and time wisely. Some may think that having money simplifies everything, but regardless of financial status, everyone’s life has its demands. Keeping your lifestyle within your means is key to managing stress. This approach has been significant for me in maintaining a balanced life.
Yitzi: This is our final question. Because of your great work and the platform that you’ve built, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Wyatt: The most powerful movement I could inspire would be to encourage people to be a little more present. Just that. Try to be more present in your day, whenever you can. For those with families and kids, spend every second you can with them and be truly present. It means more than anything else.
Yitzi: This has been such a profound, thoughtful, and wise interview. It’s really a joy to meet you, and I wish you continued success and blessings in every part of your work. I’d love to do this again next year.
Wyatt: Awesome, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Actor Wyatt Russell On Building a Lifestyle Brand Rooted in Real Experiences was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.