Danny Pino
Danny Pino is an actor, born 1974.
Few working actors have carried a badge for longer, and the interesting move of Pino's career was putting it down. The Miami-born actor spent 2003 to 2010 as Detective Scotty Valens on Cold Case, then 2011 to 2015 as NYPD Detective Nick Amaro on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is twelve consecutive years of carrying a badge on network television. The credit row here lists Special Victims Unit under 1999 because that is when the series began, not when he joined it.
What he brings to those parts is a specific kind of contained anger. Amaro was written as a man whose temper was a professional liability, and Pino played the effort of holding it in rather than the release, which is why the character worked in a format that rarely has room for interior life.
Then came Miguel Galindo on Mayans M.C., a cartel scion in a suit, and the whole instrument turned around: the same control, now used by someone with no reason to answer to anybody. He has since led Hotel Cocaine as Roman Compte. Earlier and outside the procedurals, there is real variety on the list, including The Lost City, The Burning Plain, Dear Evan Hansen and a small part in One Day at a Time. His first credit here is Burn Victim in a 2002 television film, which is where careers of this kind actually begin.
Movies (10)
TV (8)
Where to start with Danny Pino
Start with Cold Case, the show that made him. It is an unfashionable procedural with an excellent gimmick, reopening old files and shooting the past in period, and Scotty Valens gives Pino more emotional room than the format suggests.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is the bigger audience, and his run there began in 2011; approach it as a four-season arc rather than a mountain to climb.
The one to watch if you already know the cop work is Mayans M.C., where he plays Miguel Galindo with quiet, expensive menace, and Hotel Cocaine extends the same register into 1970s Miami. For range, The Lost City and Dear Evan Hansen are the film side, One Day at a Time is the comedy, and BrainDead is the strangest thing he has done.