«

»

Monique Gabriela Curnen joins “The Mentalist”

Monique Gabriela Curnen

Monique Gabriela Curnen is one of those Latinas (of Puerto Rican and German descent) who’s been working hard and often in Hollywood for years, and still hasn’t quite achieved the recognition she deserved.

Oh, you recognize her face. She’s been in everything from The Dark Knight (where she played one of Gotham’s apparently extremely rare Latinos) to the hugely under-appreciated cop drama The Unusuals back in 2009. She plays Latino characters almost as often as Anglos, including her arc as “Amelia Dominguez” on Sons of Anarchy or “Xiomara Garcia” in three separate episodes of CSI. And she splits her time between TV and film as well, with significant roles in Contagion, The Good Doctor, and the upcoming Mr. Sophistication with Gina Torres. 

Now, according to Entertainment Weekly, Monique will be joining The Mentalist on a regular basis, as “Tamsin Wade,” a strict agent who works in the gang division of the CBI. That makes for a nice change of pace; The Mentalist is often noted for being placed in a mythical California where there seem to be almost no Latinos at all, and Curnen’s inclusion in multiple episodes will mark the series’ first continuing Latina actress as it reaches its 100th episode.

Meanwhile, Monique keeps working. She continues to appear in a wide variety of shorts; she was part of Roland Emmerich’s thriller Dark Horse, and she has no less than three feature films in post-production right now. If you’d like to see some of her work, you can catch a rebroadcast of The Dark Knight on TNT Friday Nov. 30 at 8P, or her appearance in an episode of Law & Order: SVU on USA, Saturday December 1 at 10P. Or just for fun, here she is in a short (and hot!) scene with Jeremy Renner from the The Unusuals (it’s true: the currently hot-as-a-pistol Renner first came to notice on The Unusuals, even as he was making The Hurt Locker, with The Town, The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy still in the future).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lib4jT_82UY