Like his successful former co-stars on Suits, Patrick J. Adams celebrated the legal drama’s streaming success with Netflix in 2023, and has shared positive thoughts about the upcoming NBC spinoff Suits L.A. But he’s been busy with all kinds of projects of his own, including his latest to hit the 2024 release schedule, Fox’s legal drama anthology Accused, in which he plays a character who stands apart from what fans are used to seeing him play.
I spoke with Adams ahead of his Accused episode “Marcus’ Story,” which co-stars Masked Singer host Nick Cannon, and he told me he was 100% in time-off mode with family outside of Toronto after filming the upcoming 2025 TV series Lockerbie in Scotland. But just as he thought he’d be sticking with the urge to relax off-camera, the offer for Accused came, and it swayed him enough to get right back to work, albeit just for a single episode.
He shared how much of an honor it was just to be sought out for a series whose cast has also included TV faves like William H. Macy, Margo Martindale, Wendell Pierce, Jason Ritter, Rhea Perlman and many more. And then pointed out how playing against his usual character type was also a big draw, saying:
Obviously, it's a series where every episode has a different cast, and so just to be counted among the kind of actors that they've brought onto the show was immediately interesting. Then I read the part, and I don't get offered parts like this very often. I don't get to play sort of, you know...he's not a bad guy, but he's not the nicest guy. He's in a rush, and he's a little fast and loose with his morals. You know, I'm usually somebody who's reliable and kind and open-hearted and charming, and so the idea that I would get to just drive down to Toronto and hang out and create with this amazing group of people. Clark Johnson was directing the episode, and he's like a hero of mine, and I'd always wanted to work with him. It was like a no-brainer at that point.
Big props to Clark Johnson, a veteran actor of Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Wire and the upcoming Daredevil: Born Again, who has been even more prolific as a TV director. He's another sign of Accused's pedigree of talent whom Patrick J. Adams called "the real deal" among other praises later in our talk.
But to his point, it's not as if Adams has ever made a name for himself as a mustache-twirling villain, and he's so often given parts where audiences are just instantly meant to side with and trust the character. It's a wonder more projects haven't eagerly tried to get him to take on more devious roles, given how easy it would be to pull the rug out from audiences.
How Filming Accused Reminded Patrick J. Adams Of His Early-Career Acting Muscles
Regardless of how different the role was, Adams might not have agreed to take it if not for Accused's anthological nature. Only having to dedicate himself to filming a single episode justified the decision to interrupt family time. (As did the close-enough proximity of the Toronto filming locations.) Here's how he explained it:
I mean, I truly at that moment didn't want to work, because I'd just finished a lot of work, and I was just excited to be with my family, but I couldn't say no. Also, there's something to [the idea that] my whole early career, like a lot of actors, is this guest-starring that you do. Those are the only jobs you can kind of get because you don't have enough of a following or a fan base to be booking your own pilot at first, so you're just doing a lot of episodes of television. And I didn't realize how much I missed that.
While only getting smaller single-episode roles might be more discouraging for up-and-coming actors, heading up an installment of a show like Accused seems like the idealized way for this to happen. Not just for the shortened work schedule, but for the inherent challenge and spontaneity of it all. As difficult as it can be to make a character memorable across multiple seasons of TV, it's all the more complicated to pull it off in just 42 minutes.
That spur-of-the-moment creative push was a thriller for Adams to refamiliarize himself with for Accused. He continued:
It's a muscle that you don't get used to working [on longer projects]. I'm lucky enough now that I get to go work on these projects, and I get to be there full-time, and really build these relationships with people on set and create something over a longer timeline. But you forget the challenge and the fun of, like, 'Hey, I'm here for five days. How quickly can I dig in? How quickly can I make this real? How quickly can I make an interesting decision with this?' It tests a part of you as an actor that is not as tested on shows where you have, like, six episodes to really do your thing.
Does that mean we'll see Patrick J. Adams popping up in more awesome TV anthologies like American Horror Stories, Black Mirror or even for a season-long story arc in True Detective? Knowing how much he enjoyed working on Accused only helps keep the optimism alive.
For now, though, he'll keep audiences pumped over the next year with a pair of streaming series —the aircraft disaster drama Lockerbie and the Netflix thriller Wayward — as well as his co-starring role in the upcoming Yellowstone spinoff The Madison.
Accused Season 2 airs new episodes Tuesday nights on Fox at 9:00 p.m. ET.
