Paget Brewster, the comic actress who keeps going back to Criminal Minds

Paget Brewster

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 10, 1969 Concord, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, Justice League: Gods and Monsters

For an actress whose instincts run toward comedy, Paget Brewster has spent most of her working life inside a show about serial killers. Emily Prentiss, the multilingual FBI profiler she plays on Criminal Minds, is the part that made her known around the world, and it is also the part she has been dropped from, walked away from and returned to. That loop is the real shape of her career: a comic performer with a loyal following in animation and alternative stages, held in orbit by the most unsmiling procedural on American television.

The pull between those two lives started early. She grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, where both her parents worked as administrators at Middlesex School, and she left for New York to study at Parsons School of Design. Acting got in the way almost at once. She made her debut during her first year at the school, dropped out to chase the work and later moved to San Francisco to take acting classes, a detour that would shape the first job anyone paid attention to.

That job was talk, not drama. Brewster, who was born on March 10, 1969, hosted The Paget Show on KPIX-TV in the Bay Area from 1995, a late-night program that ran for 65 episodes. National viewers met her a short time later as Kathy, the girlfriend who comes between Joey and Chandler in the fourth season of Friends. Six episodes were enough to put her face on casting lists in Los Angeles.

The years that followed were built on comedy and on her voice. She played Ms. Indestructible in The Specials, the low-budget superhero satire written by James Gunn and released in 2000, then Jessica Green in the Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe and Beth, the wife of Hank Azaria‘s psychiatrist, across both seasons of the Showtime series Huff. In 2005 she began voicing Judy Ken Sebben, better known as Birdgirl, on the Adult Swim cartoon Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, a character she has carried for two decades.

Then came the role that changed the scale of everything. Brewster joined Criminal Minds in its second season, in 2006, as Prentiss, an ambassador’s daughter whose arrival in the Behavioral Analysis Unit is read as a favor called in from above, and who spends years proving she earned the seat. CBS treated the cast as replaceable more than once. During the sixth season the network released her and A.J. Cook from their contracts in what was reported as a cost-cutting move; complaints from fans brought both back the following year. In February 2012 she announced she would leave at the end of the seventh season to go back to her comedic roots.

The standard version of what happened next is that she left a hit, the bet did not pay, and she came home. It flattens the record. The network comedies did fail to last: the Fox sitcom Grandfathered, opposite John Stamos, ended after a single season. Yet the years away produced some of her sharpest work. She played Sadie Doyle, a boozy socialite who talks to ghosts, in The Thrilling Adventure Hour, the staged radio-style show recorded at Largo in Los Angeles; joined the final season of Community as Frankie Dart; and played the snobbish Dodo Bellacourt on Comedy Central’s Another Period. Nor did the official account of her exit hold up in her own telling. On Kristin Davis’s podcast Are You a Charlotte? in April 2026, she gave a blunter account of the earlier firing: someone at CBS, she said, had called showrunner Ed Bernero to ask for new women.

The return came through someone else’s departure. When CBS fired Thomas Gibson after an on-set altercation in 2016, Brewster was brought back as a series regular for the twelfth season, and Prentiss eventually took charge of the unit. She kept the voice career running alongside it. In 2017 she gave Della Duck, Donald’s twin sister, her first animated appearance in the new DuckTales, and in 2020 she played Tallulah Bankhead in Ryan Murphy‘s Netflix series Hollywood. A year later Adult Swim gave her character a series of her own in Birdgirl.

CBS ended the original show in 2020 after 15 seasons, which should have closed the circle. Paramount+ reopened it in 2022 with Criminal Minds: Evolution, with Prentiss heading the team and Brewster back in the suit. Season 19 aired between May and July 2026, and the streamer renewed the series early for a 20th. On October 30, 2026, Paramount+ confirmed that the 20th season will be the last. Production had already wrapped, so the cast shot its farewell without knowing it was one, and the episodes will air in 2027.

Her 2026 work outside the franchise leaned back toward comedy and genre. She voiced a role in Strip Law, the Netflix adult animated comedy led by Adam Scott and Janelle James, which premiered in February and was not renewed. She also plays Marge in Touch Me, Addison Heimann’s sci-fi horror comedy, which premiered at Sundance in 2025 and reached American theaters in March 2026.

Away from the set, Brewster married the composer Steve Damstra, a member of the bands Folded Light and Whirlwind Heat, in Los Angeles on November 28, 2014. The ceremony was officiated by Matthew Gray Gubler, her Criminal Minds co-star and a close friend of the couple.

The next thing audiences will see from her is the final season of the show that defined her, a goodbye filmed before anyone called it that. What follows it is open. For the first time in two decades, the question of where Paget Brewster goes after Prentiss will not be settled by a network memo.

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