Patrick J. Adams is one of those actors you’d never heard of until one day you suddenly started noticing him everywhere: those impossibly bright blue eyes staring down at you from seemingly every billboard in the city, his chiseled face flashing across your TV screen, his character Mike Ross coming up as the topic of water-cooler conversation as your co-workers discuss last night’s episode of Suits (which airs on Bravo in Canada), the runaway hit TV series that’s catapulted him to fame.
You’ve probably even found yourself Googling him, eager to find out more about the up-and-coming heartthrob and his gorgeous celebrity girlfriend, Troian Bellisario (sorry, ladies).
What you might be surprised to discover is that the self-proclaimed movie nerd got his start right here in Toronto.
These days the multi-talented 31-year-old is TV’s man of the hour. And it’s no coincidence that Adams is raking in accolades for his work at the same rate as he’s accumulating Twitter followers and diehard fans. He is and always has been driven to make it big.
Adams spent his teen years enthralled with film and acting — passions that dragged him uptown on a daily basis.
“Northern Secondary School had this incredible, world-class theatre program,” Adams says of his chosen high school, “and when I saw it at work, I thought, ‘If acting is really what I want to do with my life, there’s no better high school than this one.’ ” Not many teens are so goal-oriented as to sacrifice an extra hour of sleep every morning, but Adams was able to think long-term, and his commute from the Beaches paid off.
“In that class, I saw the real power of film, television and theatre in action for the first time. All the typical high school barriers shattered when you walked into the drama studio, and it didn’t matter who you were or where you were from. Suddenly everybody could be part of the conversation.”
For Adams, drama was already serious business. It follows suit that, when his mom told him he had to get a job, he could only conceive of working at the now-defunct York movie theatre at Yonge and Eglinton. There, he was completely in his element, enjoying sneak-preview screenings, taking home movie posters and nerding it up with other budding film buffs.
Yet for all his movie mania, Adams headed off to the University of Southern California, not to study film but to study theatre. Again, this was strategic, long-term planning on his part.
“I sensed early on that the actors that seem to go a little deeper and understand the craft on a different level were those who started in theatre,” says Adams. Here again, there was a sacrifice involved in his decision: not a naturally assertive person, he was devoting himself to at least four more years of battling stage fright. “You can’t really hide when you’re on a stage, which I appreciate even though it terrifies me most of the time,” Adams says.
Armed with his degree and his determination, Adams settled in L.A. and quickly learned that, despite his diligent preparation, movie stardom was not going to just fall into his lap.
“When you get out of school, you realize that about 99 per cent of the acting jobs in the industry are in television,” he explains.
Drawn as he was to movies, he wasn’t burning to be on TV, but business was business, so Adams turned his attention to the acting medium he’d spent the least time with, watching recommended TV shows, decoding the strengths of the format and coming to appreciate its uniqueness. Within a matter of weeks, he was also landing gigs.
Soon he was popping up with small parts on the likes of Friday Night Lights, Lost and Pretty Little Liars, and as the list of credits to his name grew longer, his friends dubbed him the “professional guest star.”
While this tenuous position stretched on a little longer than he might have liked, Adams took full advantage of the time to experiment and grow as a television actor. “Unless you’re a real natural in front of the camera, you’ve got a lot to learn,” he says. “That time taught me a lot about how to handle myself on the set and how to do what I love to do in front of the camera.”
Then in 2010, after a rough year of false starts (and even being fired from a role on an ill-fated NBC series), Adams got the opportunity to show he was the real deal: in a starring role as a fraud.
On the runaway hit Suits, Adams’ character, Mike Ross, is a brilliant con man gifted with photographic memory who bumbles his way into a position as an associate at a top Manhattan law firm. Only thing is, he has no law degree.
Today, Adams says he understood the character instantly. “I don’t necessarily connect to Ross’s genius, which for me is the acting part,” he says wryly, “but what I do connect to is the emotional core of the guy. When we meet him, we can tell he’s never had the necessary faith in himself to do the great things he’s capable of.” Admittedly, Adams is describing both Ross and himself, men whose first step to success was accessing their own inner strength.
“I really related to Ross because I had come to a place in my own life where I had to seek out my own sense of confidence to attain the things I’d wanted for so long,” says Adams. Photographic memory and fraud aside, he and his character are a perfectly matched pair.
That fact has not been lost on viewers of Suits. Though the show has only been on for two seasons, it’s been an instant success, racking up high ratings both in the U.S. and Canada. And Adams himself has already been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for best actor in a drama series.
And in Toronto (where Suits is filmed) and L.A. (where Adams spends the balance of his time), fans frequently stop the affable actor in the street to tell him they’re rooting for Ross. You can’t help but also root for Adams, who’s back on his home turf doing the work he loves and — true to form — making the requisite sacrifices.
“The shooting schedule is so all-encompassing that most of the time I don’t even know what city I’m in,” Adams says. “But in the little downtime I’ve had, it’s been excellent to reconnect to Toronto and learn it as an adult. I’ve been figuring out the neighbourhoods, finding amazing food and reconnecting with my friends from high school. Sadly I only have a very, very small window of time. I can usually only grab an afternoon to go sit in Trinity Bellwoods before I’m back on set again.”
If his run on Suits is any indication of things to come, Adams is going to have to get used to the frenzied pace. Given the foresight and determination demonstrated in his career thus far, there’s no doubt this is only the beginning of a meteoric rise to the top of the A-list.
