Ryan Keith Dorsey was born in the small coal mining town of Chesapeake, near Charleston, West Virginia, on July 19, 1983. After attending middle school in West Virginia, he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, for high school. He said that he decided to move to Charlotte, where his mother lived, because he felt that in a bigger city he would have more sporting opportunities. However, he returned to West Virginia and joined Riverside High School when it became consolidated. He had not intended this, but received a head injury while visiting his father on Thanksgiving; subsequent medical treatments in his hometown kept him there. He became interested in acting during his senior year of high school after a football injury prevented him from playing and he was encouraged to join theatre; his high school theatre program was run by a professional Hollywood actor taking time off. Dorsey studied theatre at Western Carolina University, with plans to join their football team, but dropped out and moved to New York City during his freshman year, enrolling at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts.
Dorsey began acting professionally shortly after moving to New York, working primarily in television, taking his first roles in 2013 on Southland and Parks and Recreation. He is mainly known for his recurring role as Earl on Justified in 2015, and then Duquesne “Dime Bag” Baker on Ray Donovan in 2017, and his other appearances include recurring roles on Pitch, Bosch, Yellowstone, Runaways, Stumptown, The Vampire Diaries and Nashville.
He was originally contracted for a three episode arc on Justified, before being bumped to five and then ten episodes of the thirteen-episode season. On Pitch he portrayed Tommy Miller, a member of the baseball team who objects to a woman joining the team, and he played Blake in the second season of Yellowstone. His debut feature film role came in 2016's Blood Father, a French film in the English language starring Mel Gibson, with Dorsey in a small role as the drug dealer Shamrock. In January 2021, Dorsey was added to the cast of the ABC drama Big Sky as recurring character Rand Kleinsasser.

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