Biography
Antonio Munoz was born and raised in Guatemala City. He started racing motor-cross when he was only eleven years old. During the third year of racing, he suffered a major accident, leaving him with major facial fractures and the loss of taste and smell.
Never resigned to be the victim of any circumstance, he continued racing after the accident,which he did professionally for twenty years and held the National Champion title not once but three times.
He has since been driven to appreciate the tastes and textures in all aspects of life and the human condition. After another unfortunate accident, he was forced to put his love for motor cross racing on the back burner, while he moved onto go-kart racing (125 shifters) where he excelled, achieving the "rookie-of-the-year" title during his first year. Antonio was very fortunate to experience and travel around the world and meet people from all walks of life.
In July 2000, he arrived in the US and soon started living the American Dream on the receiving end of a very lucrative BMW sales position, achieving a top sales' record in the company soon after he arrived. A strong believer in living and relentlessly following one's passion, Antonio walked away from the American financial dream to pursuit his real passion for acting, despite of the strong resistance and skepticism manifested by colleagues and people who insisted he had to be crazy to chase after something he had no chances at succeeding.
As a testament to his tenacity and self-belief, Antonio had his first break only six months after he started his acting pursuits. Desmond Gumbs, a director on Straight Out (2003) (his first movie) took a great risk on Antonio's raw talent and cast him in a major plot-driver role. His desire for intense competition and speed quickly translated into an unstoppable and unconditional commitment to his work as an actor and to collaborating with other artists.
Soon after he signed with the biggest talent agency in San Francisco Stars and again, always challenging his comfort zones, Antonio moved to Los Angeles in search of greater and more diverse work opportunities.
Since then he has worked on the top-rated shows, as well as in the feature films London (2005), Straight Out (2003), Rundown, The (2003) and Spanglish (2004) (with Adam Sandler.
Additionally, he has been seen in television and editorial commercials (Bank Of America, Ernest & Julio Gallo Wines and 21st Century Insurance) as well as industrials for The Discovery Channel.
He has trained with Ron Burrus at his studio in LA; with James Cutts at the SFAA and Beau Bonneau in San Francisco; and continues training his craft in Los Angeles. In addition to his bilingual skills, Antonio is multi-ethnic, which allows him to portray a wide array of ethnic types and he enjoys the subtle but very vivid differences in dialects and accents.
Always a well-traveled individual, Antonio has had a multi-cultural exposure during his formative international motor-cross platform, which has nurtured in him the ability to observe and internalize idiosyncrasies, behavior, accents and dialects and to invest these into bringing his characters to life with enormous conviction.
