Psych star James Roday has reclaimed his family name and will be credited as James Roday Rodriguez going forward.
"We're all on our own journeys. And everyone is, hopefully, educating themselves and self-reflecting in a way that feels most efficient and actionable to them," Rodriguez told TVLine. "For me, because I've always had a bit of a strange relationship with my own heritage, I started talking to my dad in, like, a real way, as opposed to, 'Hey, what's up? What does Christmas look like this year? Go Spurs! Or Go Titans. Or Go Cowboys.'"
"On one hand, it's unfortunate that it took the world turning upside down for that to sink in. On the other hand, it was so edifying, listening to my father talk about what it was like to be a brown person growing up in this country -- and in Texas, no less," he continued. "Having him relay to me stories about my grandparents and their experiences in the '30s and '40s… These were not stories that were shared around the Christmas tree when I was a kid."
"I was deeply moved, but also very shaken by a lot of the stuff that I heard -- stuff that I was one or two generations removed from and never needed to reconcile or even stop and think about," he shared. "It basically blew up my own relationship with my race, my sense of who I am when it comes to my relationship with that half of me. And it sent me down a road of reading and wanting to learn more about Mexican-American history and its foundation in this country. And it caused me to question a lot of the decisions that I have made as a 44-year-old man who has been working in the entertainment industry for 20 years, the biggest of which was the decision to not use my birth name when I started working professionally."
"The fact that my birth name is Rodriguez is out there [on the Internet]. I've never buried it. But I've also never led with it," he concluded.
Rodriguez hails from Texas, where he was born to a Mexican-American family. He recalled how, early in his career, he lost the lead role in Primal Fear. He was instead offered a minor, four-line part as a gang member -- which he also didn't get. "I didn’t look Latino enough," he explained. "They basically didn’t know what to do with me."
Rodriguez started using "Roday" three years later when he auditioned for a DreamWorks-produced pilot and was told, "You might want to give some real consideration to changing your name." He recalled how he got his father's blessing to follow his dream, but acknowledged, "And 20 years later, I realize I essentially perpetuated an institutionalized element of what's broken about this industry, which is, of course, a microcosm of the world we are living in... The bottom line is, I sold out my heritage in about 15 seconds to have a shot at being an actor."
Rodriguez, who also stars on A Million Little Things on ABC, concluded that the Psych sequel Psych 2: Lassie Comes Home is "the absolute right place" to introduce his full name because of the boost it gave his career.
Psych 2: Lassie Comes Home stars James Roday Rodriguez, Dulé Hill, Timothy Omundson, Maggie Lawson, Kirsten Nelson and Corbin Bernsen. The film arrives on Peacock July 15.