Although the last few years have seen Patrick J. Adams appear in TV shows like The Right Stuff, A League of Their Own and Plan B, it’s safe to say he’s still best known for playing Mike Ross on Suits, which originally ran on USA Network from 2011 to 2019. This became even more cemented when Suits was all the rage on Netflix last year, to the point that it paved the way for NBC to greenlight the spinoff Suits L.A. While looking back on his time playing Mike, Adams pointed out the Suits scene that he believes changed his life forever.
Adams has teamed up with Suits co-star Sarah Rafferty for Sidebar: A Suits Watch Podcast, which sees the two watching the series for the first time, sharing behind-the-scenes stories and talking with special guests who also worked on Suits, both on camera and behind the scenes. In a preview released by SiriusXM for the first episode, Rafferty read off a description of the scene where Mike meets Gabriel Macht’s Harvey Specter for the first time and shows off his eidetic memory. This leads to him being hired to be an associate at the Pearson Hardman law firm, despite having never gone to law school. Here’s what Adams had to say about this scene:
It's weird to have a moment on camera where you could see your life change, you know? Because this is where my life changed. The show changed my whole life. It's changed my career. It's changed the way that I work. It's changed the people in my life. So many things wouldn't have happened were it not for the show. And I can kind of distill it all down to this one scene between Harvey and Mike in this room. It's pretty wild.
Before Suits, Patrick J. Adams was arguably best known for his minor role in Old School and guest appearances in shows like Friday Night Lights and NCIS. Not that those should be trivialized, of course, but once Suits came along, that propelled the actor to new levels of fame, and that first scene between Mike and Harvey played a major role in making that happen. If that scene hadn’t played as well as it did, I doubt as many people would have been as invested in keeping up with Suits, which in turn would have affected how long its run on USA Network would have lasted.
While Sarah Rafferty stuck around to play Donna Paulsen for the entirety of Suits’ nine-season run, Patrick J. Adams departed as a series regular at the end of Season 7 alongside Meghan Markle, who played Rachel Zane. Unlike Markle, Adams later returned to recur during Season 9. Adams and Rafferty’s other co-stars when they were on Suits’ main cast together included Rick Hoffman and Gina Torres, and later additions to the starring lineup included Amanda Schull, Dulé Hill and Katherine Heigl.
In addition to all nine seasons of Suits still being accessible with a Netflix subscription, you can also stream it if you have a Peacock subscription. Suits L.A. doesn’t have a premiere date set yet on NBC, but if Patrick J. Adams, Sarah Rafferty or any of the original Suits actors are announced to be reprising their roles on the spinoff, we’ll let you know.