James Roday Rodríguez went through “James Roday” for over 20 years, choosing to forgo the use of his last name professionally.
But he said the reconnection process with his Mexican-American heritage led him to add his last name to all future credits, beginning with Wednesday’s premiere of “Psych 2: Lassie Come Home” in Peacock. In an interview with TVLine, Rodríguez discussed why he is adding Rodríguez back to his name and the events that led to his decision to leave him in the first place.
“For me, because I’ve always had a bit of a weird relationship with my own heritage, I started talking to my dad in a real way,” he said in the interview.
“It was very uplifting to hear my father talk about what it was like to be a dark person growing up in this country, and in Texas, no less,” he continued.
Rodríguez recalled his first two auditions as defining moments in which he learned that he didn’t seem “Latino enough” to put on his own last name. His second audition, in particular, led him to officially make the switch.
After he was nearly guaranteed a role in a pilot episode of Dreamworks, he said he was told to consider changing his name for the role.
“Their only concern was that the paper was not written for a Hispanic or Mexican person,” he said. “They were concerned that choosing a white man with a Mexican name might be interpreted as his ‘diverse casting’ version, and there could be a backlash.”
Then he changed it. His middle name, once David, became Roday, and he no longer used Rodríguez, although he kept it in his legal name. Looking back, he said the choice further deepened a prevalent problem across the entertainment industry.
“I came up with this name that I got from a Chekhov play I was making at the time, and I’ve been Roday ever since,” he said. “And 20 years later, I realize that I essentially perpetuated an institutionalized element of what’s broken in this industry, which is, of course, a microcosm of the world we live in.”
Recent conversations with his father, whom he described as a “proud Mexican-American man,” inspired him to reflect on his professional decisions and name change. This, along with his personal investigation into the history of Mexican Americans, ultimately preceded his return to Rodríguez’s name, he said.
“It made me question many of the decisions I made as a 44-year-old man who has worked in the entertainment industry for 20 years, the biggest of which was the decision not to use my birth name when he started working professionally,” he said. “The fact that my birth name is Rodríguez is out there [on the Internet]. I never buried him. But I haven’t led with that either. ”
