Patrick J. Adams
Patrick J. Adams is an actor, born 1981.
Patrick J. Adams spent the back half of the 2000s doing what a working Toronto actor does: a made-for-television Christmas romance, a voice part in a sketch comedy, a spot on the family drama Heartland, a couple of indies nobody saw. Then Suits arrived in 2011 with Mike Ross, a college dropout with a photographic memory faking his way through a Manhattan law firm. The show ran until 2019, and the role brought him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination in 2012.
Mike Ross could easily have been insufferable. He is written as the smartest person in every room, which is usually a licence for smugness, and Adams instead played him as somebody permanently braced for a knock on the door. The fraud was the engine of the performance, not the memory trick. He is best in the scenes where someone almost asks the wrong question and he simply has to keep talking.
Afterwards he went looking for men under pressure rather than men with secrets. He played John Glenn in The Right Stuff, all clenched propriety and no charm to spare; Guy Woodhouse in the Rosemary's Baby miniseries; an FBI agent in The Bombing of Pan Am 103. The recent credits here are Wayward, the Goethe adaptation Young Werther and the drama The Madison, which suggests a career settling comfortably into supporting weight rather than chasing another lead.
Movies (6)
TV (10)
Where to start with Patrick J. Adams
Suits first, and there is no serious argument otherwise. It is the tightest legal-caper television of its decade in the early going, and Mike Ross is the reason the format works at all.
If you want him without the suit, The Right Stuff is the interesting one. His John Glenn is stiff, devout and faintly irritating to everyone around him, and Adams commits to the irritation instead of softening it into likeability.
After that, Rosemary's Baby gives him the husband in a story whose shape you already know, A League of Their Own is the warmest supporting turn on the list, and Clara is a small science-fiction two-hander that hands him more silence than television ever did. Heartland is the pre-fame curiosity, and Wayward is the most recent thing here worth an evening.