An American actor whose best work is being the American in the wrong room. In Ripper Street he took Richard Warlow's upholstered Victorian talk and turned it into a drawl that sounded like contempt, and the series was better whenever he spoke.
Fi1m perspective
Adam Rothenberg's habit is to sound unimpressed. In Ripper Street (2012) everyone in Whitechapel speaks as though dictating a pamphlet, a subordinate clause and a flourish on every sentence, and most of the cast can be seen working to get the words out. Rothenberg does not appear to work. He lets Homer Jackson's lines fall out of the side of his mouth, flattens the ornament into a drawl and makes the whole style sound like something he finds faintly absurd. We enjoyed him more than the writing deserved: a line that would have sunk another actor came out of him as if it bored him, and the boredom was funnier than any joke Warlow wrote. It is why Jackson, the American surgeon with a past he does not discuss, who does Reid's post-mortems and lodges at Long Susan's house, is the one man in H Division we never caught acting.
He arrived at that manner by way of the New York stage, and by way of plays that reward it. He was Danny in the Second Stage revival of Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (2004) and Stanley Kowalski opposite Patricia Clarkson the same year; later he made his London stage debut in Fool for Love (2016). Shepard, Williams and Shanley write men who argue with their shoulders, and that is what he brought to Jackson, an ex-Army surgeon and Pinkerton man who can open a body and start a fight in the same afternoon. He called it "like a dream part. Early forensics, gun-slinging, card-counting, whoring, you know? It's got everything kind of rolled into one." He played it across all 36 episodes, which is a long time to keep a drawl from curdling into a tic, and the consensus is that it held.
The parts since have mostly been the same man in different rooms: Officer DeKeiffer in James Gray's The Immigrant (2013), turns in Dietland (2018), Castle Rock (2018) and The Serpent (2021), and a season of Ozark (2022) as Mel Sattem, a private investigator who will not leave the Byrde family alone. Casting directors have noticed what we noticed. He is useful as the outsider whose methods do not match the institution around him, the man who knows something the locals do not and is not polite about it. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to weigh them. We will say that an actor built to carry a series has lately been asked to carry a few episodes of someone else's.
He has made a career of being the American who does not belong where he has been put, and it has been a decent one. Somebody should write him another part with everything in it.
Biography
Adam Rothenberg is an American actor. He was born on 20 June 1975 in Tenafly, New Jersey, and trained at The Acting Studio – New York under James Price. He performed in several off-Broadway productions, including the 2004 revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Birdy (2003).
Rothenberg is best known for playing Captain Homer Jackson in the BBC drama series Ripper Street (2012–2016). His other television credits include Ozark (2017) as Mel Sattem, The Serpent (2021) as Gilbert Redland, and guest roles in Person of Interest (2011), Elementary (2012) and Orange Is the New Black (2013). Film appearances include Mad Money (2008) and The Immigrant (2013). He has also worked as a producer.
