Why Officer Luis Badillo From Blue Bloods Looks So Familiar
"Blue Bloods" officer Eddie Janko-Reagan (Vanessa Ray) has had five partners since she joined the New York City Police Department in 2013, getting paired up with four of them in just the last four years. After Rachel Witten (Lauren Patten), her partner of three years, decides to leave, she gets a new partner, Luis Badillo. The pair don't exactly hit it off when they first meet, with him refusing to call her Janko, but also resenting her for becoming a Reagan. He continuously argues with her, hoping she'll ask to be reassigned to a new partner, as seen in Season 12, Episode 6: "Be Smart or Be Dead."
The angry and sullen Badillo is the complete opposite of bubbly and extroverted Eddie, and while Eddie is used to getting along with people, the lack of filter and bluntness shown by Badillo is off-putting to her. When Jamie Reagan (Will Estes) informs her in Season 12, Episode 8, "Reality Check," that a former partner of Badillo's was killed in front of him, Eddie feels a mixture of pity and worry, wondering if her new partner is likely to snap on her at any moment.
Badillo's face may be familiar to viewers, as Ian Quinlan started as a child actor in Broadway's "The Lion King," and has spent the past decade building up his resume with quite an assortment of television roles (via Distinct Homme). Here are some of his biggest roles so far.
Ian Quinlan made his film debut in a forgotten Al Pacino movie
In 1996, Ian Quinlan made his film debut in "City Hall" as little Randy Santos, the son of Detective Eddie Santos (Nestor Serrano), who is killed in a shootout with suspected mob member Tino Zapatti (Larry Romano). Both men are killed in the shootout, and so is a 6-year-old boy that got caught in the crossfire. Mayor John Pappas' (Al Pacino) deputy mayor, Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack) starts searching for answers as to why Zapatti was free on probation, and he discovers a scandal that involves a crime boss, a politician, a judge, and ultimately, the mayor.
Quinlan, who was 6 years old at the time, doesn't have any lines in the film and is only visible in a couple of scenes in which he's with Luna Lauren Velez, who plays his on-screen mother, and Chloe Morris, who played his sister. But the role opened doors for him, and a few years later he would appear in his next film, with an equally high-profile cast.
Quinlan's violin skills helped him secure a role in Music of the Heart
Ian Quinlan considered himself fortunate to get the role of Carlos in 1999's "Music of the Heart," co-starring Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, and Cloris Leachman. "That was because I was playing violin at the time and they were looking for people who could act, but also play violin," he told The Actor's Audience. The Wes Craven-directed film is about a teacher, Roberta Guaspari (Meryl Streep), who convinces a principal (Angela Bassett) at an inner-city Harlem school to give her a job teaching violin. When she proves she can teach the kids, she expands her class to include other schools.
Quinlan plays Carlos, a young boy at River East Public School who's taking Roberta's class, but is too embarrassed to carry his violin at school, so he makes his sister do it, bringing it to him at the door to the class. After Roberta sternly reprimands him and tells him it's uncool to waste his talent, he apologizes. In a later scene, he rushes by his friends to go practice violin, and they remind him they have a game. When he tells them he can't make it and they tease him about having a date with the violin teacher, he proudly says, "Yeah, I do." Quinlan may be young in this film, but he's already showing a lot of confidence as an actor.
Quinlan's persistence helped get him a role on Gotham
After "Music of the Heart" Ian Quinlan spent a year playing Simba in Julie Taymor's "Lion King" on Broadway. "Coincidentally my big Simba was Chris Jackson, who was in "Hamilton" and "Bull," he told" Man of Metropolis. "It was a blast, being a kid in New York, getting to leave school early on a Wednesday to be on Broadway — pretty cool." He showed up in guest-starring roles in a few television shows before reappearing as Carl Pinkney in the Emmy award-winning "Gotham."
Pinkney was fresh out of the academy in Season 2 of "Gotham," recruited into the Gotham Police Department Strike Force division with three others by James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and Captain Nathaniel Barnes (Michael Chiklis). "I really wanted to try something different, and when "Gotham" came around I called my agent and said, 'Hey look, there's this part for this murderer Victor Zsasz ... I know I'm not going to get it, I'm not what they're looking for, but can you just ask them if I can show them what I can do?" Quinlan said when looking back on the role. "They granted me an audition, so then I came in and showed a darker side of what I could do."
Quinlan's determination paid off, and he began getting offers for more substantial and darker roles.
He took on the role of a real-life hero in The Long Road Home
Thanks to his role as a police officer "Gotham," Ian Quinlan started getting offers for many military roles, and one such role was Specialist Spc. Robert Arsiaga in National Geographic's "The Long Road Home," based on the book of the same name by Martha Raddatz. The miniseries, which co-stars Jason Ritter and Kate Bosworth, tells the story of "Black Sunday," when soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were attacked in Sadr City, Iraq, by insurgents, killing eight and injuring more than 60 (via ABC News).
"It wasn't until I arrived at Fort Hood and met the soldiers, and I met the Gold Star families — one of whom I'm playing their son — and I got to hear these stories of these men and women and what they do, that I was truly blown away," he said in an interview with Afterbuzz TV. "I started to really understand the massive undertaking we were doing with the show." Quinlan's dedication to the role showed with the time he spent time getting to know the family of the man he was portraying, as he tried to honor him and them with the most honest portrayal he could.
His role in Jupiter's Legacy was praised by fans
Ian Quinlan's most recent role before "Blue Bloods" is as Hutch in the Netflix original series "Jupiter's Legacy," and while the superhero show has an ensemble cast featuring Josh Duhamel, Leslie Bibb, and Ben Daniels, many considered Quinlan the breakout star of the show. Mark Millar, who wrote the graphic novels the show is based on, wrote on Twitter that "in a show where EVERYBODY steals the show he somehow stands out. I cannot wait to hear those convention cheers for this dude in the future!"
Quinlan's role as the villainous Hutch is completely different from any role he's played before, and you can tell in his performance that he enjoyed pushing the energy and edginess of his character. Since Hutch doesn't have superhero powers, Quinlan began intensely studying Muay Thai, telling CBR about how he told fight choreographer Phil Silvera that his character should be someone "who lives with no powers, who grows up in a world of people with powers, to look like he's had to fight for everything and had to scrap for every crumb he's ever been given."
While "Jupiter's Legacy" had many fans, many viewers also felt that the characters weren't fleshed out enough to entice people to watch and the costs were too high, and Netflix decided to cancel it after one season. But given Quinlan's increasing range of acting roles, it's fair to expect him to play more characters like Hutch in the future.