Jesse Lee Soffer

Jesse Lee Soffer started as a child actor and has barely had a gap since. He was Percival in Safe Passage and Dennis Loomis in Matinee, then Bobby Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel, which is a strange sort of first job: playing a 1970s sitcom child inside a joke about 1970s sitcoms.

Daytime television made him a professional. As Will Munson on As the World Turns, a role not among the credits listed here, he picked up three Emmy nominations, and the soap schedule is where a lot of American procedural leads learn to hit marks and deliver plot at speed.

That skill is the career. From 2014 to 2022 he was Jay Halstead on Chicago P.D., eight years of a role the network kept sending into Chicago Med and Chicago Fire crossovers. It is not showy work. What it demands is that an audience believe him instantly, in every scene, opposite whichever cast is on screen that week, and he was dependable enough that storylines were built around him for the better part of a decade. In 2024 he surfaced as Wesley Mitchell on FBI: International, leading the team from the fourth season, and he has moved into directing television as well. In Time in 2011 and the true-crime film Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret are the reminders that movies were an option he never especially pursued. Some actors want a filmography. Soffer has built a job.