James Roday Rodriguez
James Roday Rodriguez[1] (born James David Rodriguez, April 4, 1976) is an American actor, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for starring on the USA Network series Psych as Shawn Spencer, a hyper-observant consultant detective and fake psychic. He also starred in A Million Little Things which debuted in 2018, playing Javier "Gary" Mendez.[2]
"James D. Rodriguez" redirects here. For other uses, see James Rodríguez (disambiguation).
James Roday Rodriguez
James Roday (professional name 1998–2020)
- Actor
- director
- screenwriter
1999–present
Maggie Lawson (2006–2014)
Early life[edit]
Rodriguez was born in San Antonio, Texas, as James David Rodriguez.[1] He attended Taft High School in San Antonio.[3] His father, James "Jim" Rodriguez, is of Mexican descent, and his mother, Deborah Collins, is of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. Rodriguez's father is a retired Air Force master sergeant.[4][5]
At New York University's Experimental Theatre Wing, Rodriguez studied theatre and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts.[6] At the age of 22, he selected the professional name James Roday. In a July 2020 interview, Rodriguez explained the decision was mainly driven by producers and casting directors feeling his appearance clashed with his Latino family name. The characters he read for up until that point were not written with a Latino background in mind. In order to book his first job, he legally changed his middle name, David, to Roday (from an Anton Chekhov play), and omitted Rodriguez from his screen name. In the same interview, he stated regret that he "sold out [his] heritage in about 15 seconds" and announced that going forward he was going to use his full legal name of James Roday Rodriguez.[7]
Career[edit]
Theatre beginnings[edit]
Rodriguez started his acting career starring in various theatrical productions, including Three Sisters, A Respectable Wedding, and Severity's Mistress. He took on leading roles in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Extinction which he produced with his theatre company Red Dog Squadron. For RDS he also directed the play Greedy, and wrote and directed the one-act play Sustenance. His most recent foray onto the stage was in December 2016, when he starred in the New York production of White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour.[8]
Big screen and television[edit]
His big screen debut was in the 1999 film Coming Soon alongside Ryan Reynolds and Ashton Kutcher.
Other early film credits include the 2003 film Rolling Kansas and the 2005 film adaptation of The Dukes of Hazzard. Behind the scenes, he and writing partners Todd Harthan and James DeMonaco wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Skinwalkers. The team also worked on an unused script for the film adaptation of the video game Driver.
Rodriguez's television credits include starring roles in 2001's First Years and NBC's Miss Match in 2003.
Personal life[edit]
Rodriguez is the co-artistic director of Red Dog Squadron, a non-profit Los Angeles theater company he co-founded with Brad Raider.[17][18] In 2012, Rodriguez and, at the time, Black Dahlia artistic director Matt Shakman bought the El Centro Theatre and started a long process of renovations with the intent of reopening it under its original name Circle Theatre. In a newsletter from August 2018, Raider and Rodriguez announced that they had to resell the theatre in early 2018.[19]
Rodriguez dated his Psych co-star Maggie Lawson from 2006 to 2014, coinciding with the series run.[20][21]