Adam Rodriguez, the Criminal Minds actor who found his authority behind the camera

Adam Rodriguez

Photo: Tikiadam at English Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 2, 1975 Yonkers, New York, United States
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	Incredibles 2, Magic Mike, Magic Mike XXL

The casting decision came down to two actors. Adam Rodriguez, directing an episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution, wanted the one who looked dangerous on the surface and carried something vulnerable underneath, and he has said there was pushback before the showrunner, Erica Messer, took his side. The actor was Connor Storrie. His guest part grew from one episode to four, and by the time it aired Heated Rivalry had made him a name almost overnight. “Connor, for me, just instantly was my choice,” Rodriguez told TV Insider. It is a small story, and it says more about where he stands now than most of the roles that made his face familiar.

For most of his career Rodriguez has been the man next to the lead. He was the fingerprint specialist working beside David Caruso’s Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami, Tito in the crew of dancers around Channing Tatum in the Magic Mike films, and the agent brought into the Behavioral Analysis Unit to fill the chair Shemar Moore had left. Ensemble television runs on that kind of reliability and almost never writes about it. What his career is asking now is what an actor does with that experience once the ensemble that carried him starts to close.

Yonkers, New York, is where the record begins: Rodriguez was born there on April 2, 1975, to Janet, an airline ticket agent, and Ramon Rodriguez, an executive with the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. His father is of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent and his mother of Puerto Rican descent. At Clarkstown High School North, in New City, the plan was professional baseball, until an injury ended it. Children’s theater in New York filled the gap, and for a while he worked as a stockbroker before acting paid the rent.

The early work was the usual apprenticeship of a New York actor. A Coca-Cola commercial, a recurring part as Hector Villanueva in the police drama Brooklyn South, appearances on Law & Order, NYPD Blue and Felicity. In 1999 he appeared in Jennifer Lopez‘s video for “If You Had My Love”, and he later spent the third season of Roswell as Jesse Ramirez, eighteen episodes as a regular.

CSI: Miami changed the scale. Rodriguez was in the original cast when the spin-off premiered in 2002 and played Eric Delko for most of its ten seasons, with an interruption: he left the main cast five episodes into the eighth season, appeared in a handful more as a recurring player and came back as a regular for the ninth, staying until the series ended in 2012. Those last years also gave him his first credits on the other side of the camera, as writer and director of the episodes “Hunting Ground” and “At Risk”. In the same period he played Bobby Talercio, Hilda’s love interest, in the fourth season of Ugly Betty, and Sandino in Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All by Myself in 2009.

Film work after Miami followed the same pattern of the strong supporting player. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike in 2012 cast him as Tito, a role he repeated in Magic Mike XXL in 2015 and Magic Mike’s Last Dance in 2023, and he later sat on the judging panel, and served as an executive producer, of the HBO Max competition Finding Magic Mike. On television he took arcs as Dr. Joey Chavez in The Night Shift, as Jonathan Chavez, Jane’s writing teacher, in Jane the Virgin, and as Laz Delgado in Empire, and he directed an episode of Scorpion in 2015.

In 2016 he joined Criminal Minds for its twelfth season as Luke Alvez, an agent from the FBI’s Fugitive Task Force who arrives at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in the space left by Moore’s Derek Morgan. The show let him direct too: “Last Gasp” was his first episode, and four more followed through 2026. When the CBS run ended in 2020 he moved to Penny Dreadful: City of Angels as Raul Vega and to the NBC drama Ordinary Joe as Bobby Diaz, then returned as Alvez when Paramount+ revived the series as Criminal Minds: Evolution in 2022.

The pattern has a cost, and the credits show it. Count the badges: a police officer in Brooklyn South, a crime-lab specialist in Miami, a police detective he voiced in Incredibles 2, an FBI agent for most of the last decade. On screen, Hollywood keeps handing Rodriguez a badge, and keeps placing him in the position of the partner or the replacement. Alvez entered a beloved show defined by the absence of another actor, and the Magic Mike films kept Tito at the edge of Tatum’s story even as they turned into a franchise. Rodriguez has never made a public grievance of any of this, and the ensemble work has given him a long and steady career. It also explains why the most revealing lines on his résumé are the ones behind the camera.

That side of the work carried real weight in 2026. Rodriguez directed “The Witching Hour”, the fourth episode of the nineteenth season, which streamed on Paramount+ on June 11 and introduced Storrie’s character; the season ran from May to July. Away from the procedural he appeared in Leah McKendrick’s comedy Scrambled and in Tiffany Paulsen’s Winter Spring Summer or Fall, opposite Jenna Ortega, both released in 2024. On October 30, Paramount+ announced that the twentieth season of Criminal Minds: Evolution, due in 2027, will be the last, a decision that came after those episodes had already finished filming. Rodriguez returns as Alvez in that final run, with Joe Mantegna and A.J. Cook among the cast who are back.

He married the model Grace Gail, daughter of the actor Max Gail, in 2016. They have three children.

The next role points somewhere telling. In House of Guerrero, the boxing drama that marks Gina Rodriguez‘s feature debut as a director and is currently shooting in California, he plays Ruben Chapa, a trainer at a boxing gym in El Centro. The director is his former Jane the Virgin co-star, and the film has no release date yet. A trainer is the person in the corner who watches someone else take the punches and decides what happens between rounds, which is close to the job Rodriguez has been doing on set for years. This time it is written into the character.

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Tags: actors, Criminal Minds, Channing Tatum, Gina Rodriguez, Adam Rodriguez, Magic Mike

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