Right now, Michael Kelly can be seen on Prime Video in the fourth and final season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and starting on July 23, on Paramount+‘s latest Taylor Sheridan series Special Ops: Lioness.
But back in 2011, he starred in the one-season Criminal Minds spinoff Suspect Behavior as FBI Special Agent Jonathan “Prophet” Sims, alongside Forest Whitaker as FBI SSA/ Team Leader Samuel “Sam” Cooper, Janeane Garofalo as FBI Senior SSA Beth Griffith, Beau Garrett as FBI SSA Gina LaSalle, Matt Ryan as FBI SSA Mick Rawson, and Richard Schiff as FBI Director Jack Fickler. Kirsten Vangsness also starred in her Criminal Minds role of technical analyst Penelope Garcia.
“Getting to work with the actors that I worked with there, that was crazy. It wasn’t my first show, but it was definitely early in my career,” Kelly recalls to TV Insider. (He, his wife, and his daughter, who was a year old at the time, kept their place in New York but moved to Los Angeles for the months he filmed the drama.) “That was a lot of fun. Forest Whitaker, getting to work with that guy every day was pretty damn cool. I’ve been blessed.”
In fact, he shares, he originally auditioned for Whitaker’s role, then “my manager called and was like, ‘They’re going for Forest Whitaker.’ And I was like, ‘Great, totally, good choice. I’d do the same.’”
But then a week later, his manager called to tell him they wanted him to audition for the show again, for the character of Prophet. “When I first put it on tape, he was written as a hard from the streets guy. And so I did him as a kind of hard from the street gangster guy,” Kelly says. That worked, and he went to test in Los Angeles as that hard street guy. During the test, “they were like, ‘Do one however you want to do it.’ And I’m from Georgia, so I was like, I’ll just make the dude from Georgia.”
He got the part, and Prophet was from Georgia. “I was able to wear my Braves hat in it, and it was a lot of fun, playing that guy who’s found Christ in jail. It was cool,” he says.