Adam Rodriguez wants Criminal Minds: Evolution viewers to prepare for a wild ride this season — with a shocking ending.
“I’ll just say, I think you’ll be distraught [by the way the season ends] until you get the next season,” Rodriguez, 50, teased during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly ahead of the Thursday, May 8, premiere. “Hopefully, we always leave you there.”
Season 3 started off strong with an unsub a.k.a unknown subject who forced his victims to swim in an open pool until they gave up and drowned. That hit close to home for Rodriguez, who recalled a past drowning experience that he was reminded of while filming the episode.
“It’s intense and it doesn’t take much to bring you back to that moment where you think your life is going to be over. Our guy is mostly operating out of swimming pools — but sometimes in the ocean and that makes it even more scary,” the actor noted. “It’s dark. This is what you get from Criminal Minds. It’s going to be dark and completely diabolical evil. The best part is we get to be the heroes, put the bad guys away and save some people hopefully.”
Since 2005, viewers have tuned in to watch a group of criminal profilers who work for the FBI as members of its Behavioral Analysis Unit. The crime drama explores different fictional cases and shows how behavioral analysis helps the team locate their unknown subjects.
“Almost every episode I’m like, ‘Damn, I do not want that to be me. That sounds like the worst way to die,'” Rodriguez quipped. “But I will say the season 3 premiere did hit home in a different way. Because the idea of drowning is something that I feel like I’ve gotten as close as I ever want to get to.”
After the original Criminal Minds series was revived by Paramount+ after its initial conclusion in 2020, the stakes have gotten even higher.
“Now that we’re on Paramount+ we’ve got this latitude to do so much more with the show. It’s just more exciting every time because it’s almost like having a box of new toys and we’re getting to figure out what we can do,” Rodriguez told Us. “Those toys are basically space and time. It is room to give the show to breathe and space to examine characters’ lives more deeply and even to get more deep into the minds of the criminals that we’re after.”
Rodriguez noted that moving platforms allowed their characters to be “more believable,” saying, “It also gives us a chance to not have to squeeze so much story in between commercials and being worried about time constraints. We’ve all enjoyed this new freedom. I know it takes a little while to get used to the new format and it’s a little more serialized now — but I think we’re really fine tuning the formula and finding the thing that everybody loves.”
He concluded: “We’ve got the freak of the week [cases] where we track down one killer and put them away and then we get the satisfaction of that. But doing it in a serialized way also gives us the luxury of having an overarching story that it just allows for more exploration for the actors and the writers.”
New episodes of Criminal Minds: Evolution air Thursdays on Paramount+.
