Kevin Alejandro

Put Kevin Alejandro in a scene and someone will hand him a badge. He has carried one through most of his working life on television, and he wears it the way the good second detective always does: shoulders set, eyes on the suspect, letting the louder man have the line. He is not the one who gets the monologue. He is the one who has already read the file.

In Southland (2009) he is Detective Nate Moretta, working gang cases with Michael McGrady's Daniel Salinger, and the trouble is not him but where the series put him. Ann Biderman's show is at its best in a patrol car with Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie, handheld and nearly unscored, and every cut back to the detectives' office, to briefing, door and interrogation, is a cut back to a cop show you have seen. We kept waiting for Moretta's scenes to become the programme around them, and they never did, which we put down to the writing rather than the man playing it; he does what the scenes ask with nothing wasted, and they ask for little. Before that, on Shark (2006), he was Danny Reyes, one of the juniors who exist for James Woods to lecture. He has since described that job as a big break, and we can see why it mattered to him; from the sofa it is hard to pick him out.

Then the badge went somewhere odd. True Blood (2010) made him Jesús Velázquez; Arrow (2013) made him Sebastian Blood, the first part to let him be the threat rather than the man chasing it; and Lucifer (2016) made him Dan Espinoza, a detective again, but this time the one ordinary man in a squad room that includes the Devil. That is the part most people know him for, and it is easy to see why it suits him. The steadiness that read as furniture in Southland reads as sanity in Lucifer: he keeps track of the case while the rest of the cast keeps track of eternity. He has said that what he related to in Dan was "how human he is and how flawed he is", and that is what he does well, a decent man slightly out of his depth and aware of it. He has since directed episodes of the same series, voiced Jayce in Arcane (2021), and moved on to Fire Country.

A career of detectives will do things to an actor, and the fair criticism is that nobody, least of all the people casting him, has tested what else he can do. We have not seen it either. On the evidence of what we have reviewed, he is a reliable presence in a strand the writers were not paying attention to, and the interesting question is what he would be in one they were. Directing may be his answer. If it is, we would rather see him behind the camera on something where nobody carries a gun.