Patrick J. Adams Is ‘so Glad’ He Didn’t Watch ‘Suits’ Until Now
Millions of people have watched Suits thanks to its renewed popularity (streaming records have been broken and a spinoff is on the way). But star Patrick J. Adams wasn’t one of them. That is until he and his co-star, Sarah Rafferty, who played Donna Paulsen in the USA original series to his Mike Ross, decided to watch it for the first time as part of a podcast. Ahead, why Adams is “so glad” he waited so long to watch Suits after putting it in a “box.”
Adams spent years ‘too scared’ of watching ‘Suits’ due to ‘insecurities’
Talking about watching Suits, which ran from 2011 to 2019, for his and Rafferty’s new “Sidebar” podcast, Adams revealed he didn’t watch the legal drama sooner because of his own “insecurities.”
“Look, I didn’t watch the show for a reason. I am not good at watching myself on camera. It is a problem,” he told BuzzFeed. “I’ve been sort of keeping it in this box,” he later added. “Because I didn’t want to interact with it, and I was too scared to watch it and all my insecurities.”
Slowly he came around to the idea. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s not healthy.’ To just take this thing that’ll probably be, you know, next to my name when I die as, like, the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and to pretend it didn’t exist or not engage with it.”
Adams played Ross, a newcomer to the high-powered New York law firm of Pearson Hardman, hired by Harvey Spector (Gabriel Macht) after a memorable job interview. As for Rafferty, fans will remember her as the person who knows all when it comes to the firm.
“So after this huge outpouring of support and this renaissance of it last summer, it was like, we have to watch this show,” Adams explained. (He, Rafferty, and a number of cast members reunited at the Golden Globes sans Meghan Markle.) “If we’re gonna watch this show, let’s watch it together and engage with fans and make a thing of it.”
“But in the process of doing that, I was terrified,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna start watching this show, and I’m gonna not want to watch the next episode. And that’s gonna be problematic because we’re doing a podcast.’”
Watching ‘Suits’ for the first time wasn’t anything like Patrick J. Adams expected
None of that happened to Adams. “The exact opposite has been true. It’s like, I am so loving it. I’m so proud of everybody on that screen and the people behind the camera,” he said. “Any thought that I would have that this would be too hard to get through or cringey, enough time has passed now where it’s just like, ‘Wow, this is really fun.’”
He also noted waiting so long to watch Suits means he can dissect it with his co-stars all while appreciating the work they all did together.
Adams can “be like, ‘Oh my god. I can’t believe you did that thing, Sarah. That was so good.’” Or he can “call Gabriel and say, like, ‘Where did you come up with that idea?’ And just seeing all of it actually play out.”
“I’m so glad I didn’t watch it because now I can have so much more gratitude and appreciation for it,” he added.
Rafferty and Adams first met while filming Mike’s interview in the ‘Suits’ pilot
Every Suits fan knows the scene—the one in the pilot that brings Harvey and Mike together. (Watch it here). It marked a big moment for the two characters as well as the cast members themselves.
Adams met Rafferty, who became one of his “lifelong friends” during the show’s original run, while filming the scene where Mike impresses Harvey with his photographic memory and gets hired despite not having a Harvard Law degree.
“The whole hotel sequence where I ended up getting the job at Pearson. So that would’ve been our first meeting. Like, ‘Hi. We’re doing this scene together,’” Adams recalled. In the premiere episode of their “Sidebar: A Suits Watch Podcast,” he explained to Rafferty how the scene marked a life-changing moment for him personally.
“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,” he said in the podcast’s Sept. 24, 2024, premiere episode (via Entertainment Weekly). “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,” Adams added. “And I can kind of distill it all down to this one scene between Harvey and Mike in this room. It’s pretty wild.”
New episodes of “Sidebar: A Suits Watch Podcast” drop weekly.
