A.J. Cook, the Criminal Minds actress who outlasted the network that dropped her

A.J. Cook

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	July 22, 1978 Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Virgin Suicides, Final Destination 2, Mother's Day

There is a version of Criminal Minds in which Jennifer Jareau left for good. In that version the network decided the show needed different women, the character got a short farewell, and A.J. Cook became another actor who passed through a hit on her way somewhere else. It lasted one season. Viewers wrote letters and signed petitions, the producers brought her back, and the Canadian actress has stayed ever since. When Paramount+ announced that Criminal Minds would end for a second time, she was the only member of the first season’s main cast still on it.

That kind of staying power is easy to read as loyalty, or as the comfort of a steady job. Her record suggests something harder. The studio that dropped her also paid her, for years, a fraction of what two male co-stars earned, and she closed that gap only by being ready to walk away from the part that defined her. The calm agent at the centre of the team was played by someone who learned to bargain hard.

She grew up in Whitby, Ontario, near Oshawa, where Andrea Joy Cook was born on July 22, 1978. In second grade she was declared legally blind because of severe astigmatism; teachers first suspected a learning disability, since she could not read letters she could not see on the board. A lens implant finally corrected it in 2007. Dance gave her a place where nothing had to be read aloud. She started jazz, tap and ballet at four, competed for years, and has said that without acting she would probably have opened a small dance studio. At sixteen she decided to try acting instead.

The first paid job was a McDonald’s commercial in 1997, followed by a guest part in Goosebumps and two television films. Two years later Sofia Coppola cast her as Mary Lisbon, one of the five doomed sisters of The Virgin Suicides, and the same year she took the lead in Higher Ground, playing Shelby Merrick, a teenager at a wilderness school for troubled kids, opposite Hayden Christensen. The series lasted a single season. What followed was a run of genre work: the snowboard comedy Out Cold, the slasher Ripper, and Final Destination 2, in which her Kimberly Corman has the premonition of a highway pile-up that sets the whole film moving. A main role in the first season of Tru Calling came next.

Then, in September 2005, CBS launched Criminal Minds, and Cook became Supervisory Special Agent Jennifer “JJ” Jareau of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. TMDB now counts more than 340 episodes. The writers folded Cook’s own life into the character: when she became pregnant with her first son, JJ did too, and the boy who plays Henry LaMontagne is Mekhai Andersen, her real son. Her younger son, Phoenix, later joined the cast as JJ’s second child, Michael.

The critical chapter of her career is the one the network would rather forget. In June 2010 CBS declined to pick up her option for season six and cited budget cuts. Former executive producer Ed Bernero later said network executives had called him and asked him to get rid of Cook and Paget Brewster, and Brewster said the women who replaced them were paid twice as much. Cook returned for two episodes after the fan outcry and was back as a regular from season seven. The money stayed unequal. According to Deadline, she and Kirsten Vangsness had consistently been paid less than half of what Matthew Gray Gubler and Shemar Moore earned; in 2013 they won raises but not parity. In 2017 the two negotiated together, the studios saw them only after closing the men’s deals, and this time they were prepared to leave. They came back essentially on par with Gubler. There is a cost in the other direction too. Two decades inside one procedural left her film work outside it thin, mostly small genre titles, and it is fair to say her range beyond JJ has been tested far less than her endurance.

She moved behind the camera on the show that kept her. Her directing debut, “Chameleon”, aired in season fourteen in 2019, and she has directed an episode in each season since the revival: “Forget Me Knots” in 2023, “Contagion” in 2024 and “…All the Devils Are Here” in 2025. When the CBS run closed in February 2020 after fifteen seasons, she stepped away from acting for a while, then guest-starred in 9-1-1 and returned for Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount+ in 2022.

The revival leaned on the agents’ private lives, and in 2025 that came at JJ’s expense. After Josh Stewart chose not to return as her husband Will, the show used a collapse scene it had filmed seasons earlier and shelved, and killed the character. “We were all so against it, but we didn’t have a say,” Cook told Entertainment Weekly, adding that the series does what it always does: “we write to life.” The nineteenth season, which ran from May 28 to July 23, 2026, followed JJ moving in with Penelope Garcia and trying to talk to Henry about his choice of college, with both of her sons back on screen.

On October 30, 2026, Paramount+ announced that the twentieth season will be the last, and the episodes had already finished filming when the decision was made. In 2019, shooting what everyone believed was the final CBS season, Cook told Parade: “I grew up here. This is my family. My family doesn’t know life without this show either.” The difference this time is that the cast did not know they were saying goodbye.

Away from the set, Cook has been married since August 2001 to Nathan Andersen, whom she met in a film class at Utah Valley University. She was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and no longer practises. The family lives in Los Angeles. Their second son was named Phoenix because the couple had been told they could not have more children.

The last season of Criminal Minds: Evolution reaches Paramount+ in 2027, with no premiere date yet. After that, for the first time since she was in her twenties, Cook’s next job will not be decided by a renewal call, and what she picks will say more about her than another season of JJ could.

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