What David Zayas Has Been Doing Since Playing Angel Batista On Dexter
For eight seasons, David Zayas portrayed Detective Angel Batista on the hit Showtime drama Dexter, opposite Michael C. Hall as the titular serial killer. As Dexter Morgan's colleague at the fictional Miami Metro Police Department (and his self-described best friend), Batista ran point on many of the murders investigated throughout the show's run, and rather unbelievably never caught on to Dexter's own chaotic-lawful interpretation of serial murder. Unlike a few choice main characters, Batista lived through the series until its infamously frustrating finale in 2013. His heart and compassion made for the perfect foil for Dexter's detached, clinical fascination with the grisly detail of his day job.
Since Dexter left the air, Zayas has certainly kept himself plenty busy — he has more than 20 credited projects since 2013. Zayas being very much a working actor, those roles have been big, small, and tonally all over the place, and we've collected an assortment of that work for the erstwhile Batista fan to dip into if they want to check in on the latter-day artistic reincarnations Zayas has been up to for the past several years. Here's what David Zayas has been doing since playing Angel Batista on Dexter.
Since Dexter ended, David Zayas has continued to indulge in the typecast
Here's a fun contextual fact for you: David Zayas worked as a beat cop in New York City for 15 years before switching to acting full time. Now that you know, it makes a ton of sense that most of Zayas' career has been spent portraying law enforcement and criminals alike. Detective Angel Batista was far from his first law enforcement-related role, and since Dexter ended, it certainly hasn't been his last.
Within a year of departing from Dexter, Zayas landed the famous Batman villain role of Sal Maroni for the first season of Fox's Batman prequel series Gotham. Maroni is a mob boss in the city of Gotham featured across a lot of Batman media – portraying the more normal, everyday criminal element in the city as opposed to the supervillains like Joker or the Penguin. Gotham finished airing in April 2019, but you can still stream the show on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
If you're feeling more in the mood for a movie, Zayas appeared in the 2016 feature film The Lennon Report, a film set in the immediate aftermath of John Lennon's assassination in 1980. Zayas portrays Officer Medina, one of the members of law enforcement who responded on-scene. The film wasn't reviewed terribly well, but the stated intent of director Jeremy Profe was to correct urban-legend-level misconceptions of the event through the people who were actually there to give statements, which is a unique dramatic take on a famous historical event. You can find The Lennon Report on Vudu, iTunes, and Amazon Prime.
More recently, Zayas appeared in a recurring role on Blue Bloods, the police procedural drama on CBS starring Donnie Wahlberg and Tom Selleck. He portrayed the Governor of New York, Martin Mendez. Though Zayas appeared on a few episodes of the eighth and ninth seasons of Blue Bloods, he has yet to return in the latter half of 2019 for the 10th season. You can stream older episodes of Blue Bloods on Hulu, Amazon Prime, and iTunes.
David Zayas has also branched out since the end of Dexter
It's perfectly well and good to act in the roles that feel most familiar to you (especially when it used to be your real-life job), but every actor needs to stretch their wings every now and again.
Beginning in 2016, Zayas held a recurring role on Hulu's ill-fated surreal crime drama Shut Eye. The series starred Jeffrey Donovan (of Burn Notice fame) as Charlie Haverford, one of the dozens of psychics doing business in Los Angeles, and chronicled how his family operates a major crime syndicate through psychics as a front. All is normal until Charlie takes a nasty hit to the head and begins experiencing visions he isn't sure are real. On Shut Eye, Zayas portrayed Eduardo Bernal, a gangster who pulls Charlie into his criminal enterprise and away from the Romani that are his true bosses. Unfortunately, the series was canceled after just two seasons – a casualty in Hulu's restructuring of its scripted shows when streaming competition really began to flare in the past couple years. It's a bit of a tragedy of circumstance, and if you choose to watch Shut Eye, know that it won't have a clean ending, but any show with Jeffrey Donovan attached is going to be charming. At a tidy 20 episodes, Shut Eye is at least easy to dip into and out of. It's still available to stream on Hulu.
Turning again to feature film, Zayas co-starred in the flick Lost Cat Corona, released in 2017. In it, he portrays Ponce, the good friend of the protagonist, Dominic, played by Ralph Maccio. The indie comedy's plot revolves around Dominic's wife's lost cat Leonard; mild-mannered and confrontation-averse Dominic is tasked with finding the cat, assisted by Ponce. What follows is an increasingly nutty series of happenstances that send Dominic and Ponce down the rabbit hole of their New York neighbors' wacky and sometimes dangerous lives. All the while, Dominic must learn to, well, confront his lifelong fear of confrontation. Lost Cat Corona didn't pan out very well with critics, but it's generally found to be entertaining for its strong, multifaceted slate of kooky character actors rather than the plot itself. You can rent Lost Cat Corona on Vudu, Amazon Prime, and iTunes.
What's next for David Zayas?
2020 will continue Zayas' streak fulfilling secondary roles with two feature films: Eli Moran and Force of Nature.
Eli Moran seems to have had quite a journey through development hell, and may in fact have been sitting in the can for some time waiting for a distributor. You can still find a trailer from 2016 for the film, posted by its editor Paul McAleavey, tucked away on YouTube with barely any viewership numbers. Director T.J. Collins' personal filmography page on Stage32 (think LinkedIn for the film industry) hasn't been updated since 2015, and lists Eli Moran as a film approaching imminent release, but that obviously never came to be. The film is billed as sports drama about a talented high-school age basketball player struggling to stay on track with his life and career goals after his father unexpectedly dies. Zayas portrays one of his coaches on the team. If IMDb is to be believed (a shaky proposition considering this film's bumpy path to release), Eli Moran will at last have some kind of showing in November 2020.
Force of Nature will no doubt be a much higher-profile release, as it's both produced by and starring Mel Gibson. The film is set in Puerto Rico, and in it Gibson plays a retired cop protecting a building's occupants before and during an imminent hurricane. Said building is also the target of a heist. Additional details on Force of Nature are light at the moment, but it appears that the building isn't necessarily a bank and the heist isn't a typical one. Zayas was cast as one of the men performing the heist, and his character will go by the moniker "John the Baptist." The character will be cold, calculating, and completely willing to let his criminal compatriots be sacrificed to secure his objective. The film is intended to be released on an unspecified date in 2020.