“My first dunk was on that basket,” the actor Ramón Rodríguez said. This was on a drizzly weekday morning in May, and Rodríguez was revisiting former haunts in the East Village, where he grew up. He began with the Tompkins Square Park basketball courts.
“It’s a little low rimmed,” he admitted, pointing at the basket. “But it was a big deal.”
At an inch or two under six feet, Rodríguez, 45, is plenty tall for an actor, though short for a basketball player. Still he kept at it, and that tenacity has served him in Hollywood, where he spent years watching great shots hit the rim.
”How many times was I told no and cut from a team?” he said. “I mean, countless. Rejection, it was always fuel for me.”
It fueled him until 2022, when he was offered the title role in “Will Trent,” an ABC procedural about a dapper, damaged investigator and Chihuahua dad. The series is based on books by Karin Slaughter. In those books Will is described as tall, blond and lanky. So Rodríguez wasn’t an obvious choice. But despite his skepticism — he had been burned by network shows before — he signed on. “Will Trent” was renewed for a second season.
“I was like, OK, that does not happen to me,” he said. But it did. A third season followed, ending in May on a cliffhanger (two characters may not survive) that presumably will be resolved when the show returns in January.
In the park, Rodríguez, who now lives in Southern California, walked his old courts. The backboards were new. The concrete had been repainted. But the old feeling remained. “This was my life,” he said, swagger ceding to nostalgia.
He has a new life now. Though it has received relatively little critical acclaim, “Will Trent” has solid ratings. Episodes, which also stream on Hulu and Disney+, averaged 11.6 million viewers across multiple platforms in the just-concluded 2024-25 season, according to Nielsen, which puts “Will Trent” among the Top 20 most-watched shows on TV.
It has given Rodríguez, who recently appeared opposite Viola Davis in the Amazon thriller “G20,” a major career boost. He may not need those rims lowered any more.
Rodríguez, whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, was raised by his mother not far from the park. He shared a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with her and his three older sisters. “Lot of love, not a lot of space,” he said. The basketball courts, like the nearby library and the Boys’ Club, were an acceptable refuge.
“If I was in the park, my mom knew I was pretty much OK,” he said.
Basketball became an obsession. He would shoot at all hours. He slept with a basketball. Friends told him they knew he was coming down the block when they heard the sound of dribbling. He was offered an athletic scholarship to a boarding school on the wooded shores of Lake Michigan. As a city kid, he felt intense culture shock. “It was terrifying, honestly,” he said.
(As he spoke, he stepped around a dead, headless bird. “That pigeon had a rough night,” he said, unfazed.)
As Rodríguez prepared to graduate, he made a VHS sizzle reel of his best plays that ultimately convinced Wheeling University, a small college in West Virginia, to recruit him. He stayed there two years — he left after his coach was fired — then came back to the city and enrolled at New York University, in the sports management and leisure studies program.
His career as a player was over, but he was still a whiz with a basketball. In 2001, a friend called and convinced him to come to a Nike event where free sneakers were being distributed. At the event, his skills persuaded Nike employees to put him in a commercial. There were more commercials, then commercials that didn’t involve sneakers, then a few guest roles.
He had cornrows back then, and most of his early roles were variations on the drug dealer, the gang banger. Some variations were nuanced, like his recurring role on “The Wire” as the boyfriend of the stickup man Omar (Michael K. Williams). But it was hard not to feel stereotyped.
“I literally did a show called ‘Gang Related,’” he said. A Fox crime drama, it was canceled quickly.
Rodríguez pointed at a luxury condo building on the former site of Mary Help of Christians Church, where he attended elementary school. He struggles sometimes with the neighborhood’s gentrification, but he likes to remind himself that New York has always been in flux. Other reminders are more graphic: Walking in the Brooklyn a few days earlier, Rodríguez had come across police officers pulling a body from the East River.
“I was like, it’s still New York,” he said.
In 2021, he found his dream role, as a Nuyorican politician, in a pilot based on the Xochitl Gonzalez novel “Olga Dies Dreaming.” He pitched it to Hulu, which ultimately passed, but in consolation an executive there mentioned another project at ABC, the streamer’s corporate sibling: “Will Trent.”
Rodríguez was initially reluctant, worrying that a procedural would feel too formulaic. But the showrunners, Liz Heldens and Daniel T. Thomsen, convinced him that Will was deeper than the average TV crime solver. A product of the foster system and a survivor of physical abuse, Will is severely dyslexic and likely neurodiverse. He is also, of course, a gifted investigator who can see patterns that others miss.
Rodríguez was also mindful that Latino leads are rare on TV. “It’s sad, but true,” he said.
At first Rodríguez as Will, a character not written as a Latino, seemed like a fruitful example of colorblind casting. But it was something more. As the show went on, Will began to explore his identity. He learned that his mother was Puerto Rican, which allowed the show to travel to the island, a full-circle moment for Rodríguez, a frequent visitor.
“To be able to go there with the show that I’m the lead and an executive producer on, it was incredible,” he said.
He was standing in the 14th Street Y, where he learned to swim and, as a teenager, worked as a gym attendant. “I love this place,” he said. “It’s my church.”
After signing in at the desk, he made his way to the basketball courts, where he ran into an old friend, a Y regular now in his late 80s. They shot a few baskets and expressed their hopes for a Knicks playoffs win. (The next night, with Rodríguez in attendance, it would happen.)
Rodríguez shot the ball and then retrieved it, shot and retrieved. Swish. Swish. Swish. It had taken years of practice, thousands of hours to make those shots look easy, which is also true of his current professional success. He is proud of his own story, of the places and people that made him. In “Will Trent” and beyond he hopes to tell more stories, particularly Latino stories.
“There’s just so many stories that haven’t been told,” he said. “So many people are in the fight of trying to move the needle. But there’s still so much more to do.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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