Jon Huertas
Jon Huertas is an actor, born 1976.
The credit reads Jon Huertas; he was born Jonathan William Scott Hofstedt. The professional name has been on screen since the mid-1990s, when he was picking up single episodes of Moesha and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and playing a terrorist in Executive Decision, and it took roughly a decade of that before anything stuck.
Generation Kill was the turn. As Sergeant Antonio Espera he had the closest thing that miniseries has to a running commentary, a Marine keeping up a sardonic analysis of the war he is fighting while fighting it competently, and Huertas played it without ever letting the character become the show's mouthpiece.
Castle then gave him a long run as Javier Esposito, and it is a demonstration of a job that gets no credit: the second detective. Esposito exists to move information and to bounce off his partner Ryan, and the double act the two of them built is a large part of why that show stayed watchable well after its central will-they-won't-they had gone stale.
This Is Us handed him the hardest assignment of his career. Miguel Rivas is the second husband, a man the audience arrives predisposed to resent, and the series spent years slowly rearranging that resentment. Huertas plays him with a patience bordering on stubbornness, never asking to be liked, which is precisely why it works.
Movies (13)
TV (11)
Where to start with Jon Huertas
Generation Kill is where to begin. Seven episodes, the best thing he is in, and Espera is the character who lets an audience hear what the invasion sounded like from inside a Humvee.
For the long haul, Castle is comfort television done properly, and Huertas and the Ryan half of the partnership are the reason to keep going once the cases start to blur. This Is Us is the more demanding watch and the better acting: Miguel is written as an obstacle and played as a person, a harder trick than it sounds.
After that the pickings thin. Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Elementary are guest work, Right at Your Door is a genuinely bleak low-budget thriller worth your time, and Why Do Fools Fall In Love casts him as Joe Negroni of the Teenagers, the earliest of his notable parts.