Silas Weir Mitchell plays the men a room would rather not have in it, and on Grimm he turned that habit into the most watchable thing in a middling show. Monroe, put upon and reluctant, is the reason to stay.
Fi1m perspective
Watch him open a door. On Grimm, every time the detective turns up on Monroe's step, Silas Weir Mitchell winces before he speaks, as if he had seen this coming and hoped, against the evidence, that it would not be today. Then he objects, at length, in sentences that sound worked out on the drive over. It is a small piece of business and he repeats it across six seasons without it wearing thin, which is harder than it looks.
He arrived there by the long route. From the mid-1990s he was a guest-part actor, the man cast when a procedural needed someone volatile for a single episode and an unsettling stare to go with him. Prison Break (2005) gave him something to hold on to as Haywire, a mentally ill escapee who is frightening and pitiable in the same scene, and My Name Is Earl (2005) let him be odd for laughs as the ex-con Donny Jones. He has said, "I play outsiders. That's just the way it's gone for me, and I think that's fantastic." The parts bear him out.
Grimm (2011) was the turn. Monroe is one of the creatures, a Blutbad who has gone straight and would like to be left alone, and the show, which we scored 63, needed him badly: the lead is bland, the effects are rubbery, and the mythology grows faster than the writing can carry it. Mitchell supplies what is missing. He plays the exposition as complaint, so the lore arrives from a man who resents being asked, and he plays the wolf underneath as a temper he is embarrassed by rather than a threat. We laughed more than we expected to at a network monster show, and nearly all of it was him.
The best of it is with Bree Turner. Rosalee Calvert gives Monroe someone to be gentle with, and Mitchell, who has spent a career being the person others edge away from, turns out to be good at tenderness. Their scenes are the warmest in the series, and they are the ones we would show a sceptic. Opposite David Giuntoli's Nick he does the other job, finding the hero tiresome so that the hero has something to push against, and that too is a service.
The limit is that we have only seen him do this one thing at length. The guest roles are variations on the stare, and Rat Race (2001) gives him a hardware store and a supporting part to be odd in. Later work on S.W.A.T. (2017) and Paradise Lost (2020) has been guest and recurring again. Whether there is a lead in him, nobody has yet asked. On the evidence of Monroe, someone should, and should give him a door to answer.
Biography
Silas Weir Mitchell is an American character actor. He was born Silas Weir Mitchell Neilson on 30 September 1969 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Brown University in 1991 with degrees in theatre and religion, and received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1995. After early stage work in New York, he began appearing in television guest roles in the mid-1990s.
Mitchell is known for recurring roles including Charles 'Haywire' Patoshik in Prison Break (2005–2007), Donny Jones in My Name Is Earl (2005–2009), and Monroe in Grimm (2011–2017). He has also appeared in episodes of 24, The Mentalist, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Criminal Minds, Dexter, and films such as Rat Race (2001) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).
