James David Rodriguez of San Antonio, Texas is having a pretty good time. Just over five years ago, he pole-vaulted from relative obscurity into the heady heights of cable TV stardom when he appeared as the more-than-slightly goofy fake-psychic detective Shawn Spencer in Psych. He was the newbie in the cast, working with people like Corbin Bernsen (L.A. Law and a zillion other shows) and Dulé Hill (who had already made his mark on Broadway in The Tap Dance Kid and on TV in The West Wing, but he carried the show like a pro–so much so that he ascended to the role of producer, writer and director in the show’s later years. Now–or rather on Oct. 12–Psych returns for another season, and claims the crown as USA’s longest-running series still in production, and certainly one of its most popular.
And Mr. Rodriguez–usually known as James Roday–is on the move.
Acting’s only part of his game. He’s been a writer almost as long as he’s been an actor; way back in ’06, he and his partners sold Skinwalkers, a mother-and-son werewolf actioner, and he’s already written almost a dozen Psych episodes as well. He’s also one of the founding members of Red Dog Squadron, a non-profit theater company that’s almost ten years old and has produced everything from Shakespeare to Mamet to original plays. Always to sell-out crowds.
It’s true, most folks don’t know that Roday is Latino (Mexican, actually, on his father’s side), but he’s never hidden it (in fact, he only changed it at the insistence of a TV exec, and even then at the last possible minute.) He even asked that the role he played in the horror anthology Fear Itself be converted into a Latino character. He even charmed the folks on the red carpet at the ’09 ALMA Awards, as this clip shows.
He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s talented–and he’s just a little bit driven. As he said in a great Q&A with Kiko Martinez at Hispanic Magazine a couple of years ago, “We can’t stop and we can’t rest and we can’t let our foot off the gas until it’s over.” And that seems to apply to his entire career.
Welcome back, Mr. Rodriguez.
