Barry Berkman | Criminals | Hollywood | Other Characters
open/close all folders
Los Angeles Police Department
Janice Moss
Detective Janice Moss
Portrayed By: Paula Newsome
A police detective who starts seeing connections between Ryan Madison's murder and the activities of the acting class.
- Cassandra Truth: The only one who consistently believes the murderer is one of Ryan's fellow actors, while her fellow cops are content to draw increasingly wilder conclusions about Ryan's criminal connections. She eventually finds the evidence she needs, but is too late to stop Barry from catching up to her.
- Deadpan Snarker: She's quite prone to snarking, particularly at her rather inept colleagues.
- Deuteragonist: Janice's investigation gets almost as much focus as Barry himself, and drives the plot just as much as he does.
- Fake Guest Star: Paula Newsome is listed as part of the recurring cast, but she appears in almost every episode of the first season and is essentially the Deuteragonist.
- Hero Antagonist: She's one of the biggest dangers to Barry, but she's far from a bad person. She's just doing her job, and trying to do it well.
- Killed Offscreen: The camera cuts away as she and Barry exchange gunfire, but his survival and calm attitude afterward indicate that she was indeed killed. In Season 2, Barry confirms that he did in fact kill her.
- Knight in Sour Armor: After Loach's marriage falls apart, she admits to a colleague she knew it would happen since divorce is pretty common for homicide detectives.Moss: I mean, come on! She's a human being and he's a homicide detective.
- Likes Older Men: If her attraction to Gene is any indication.
- May–December Romance: With Cousineau, who is much older than her.
- Nice Girl: She's somewhat stern, but she's actually a fairly nice person who only becomes frustrated when dealing with obvious incompetence.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Barry tries to convince her of this after she finds out the truth about him. It doesn't work.
- Only Sane Man: She's the only member of the LAPD who isn't an idiot. Loach is mostly absorbed by his own personal dramas and everyone else is pretty incompetent, generally forcing her to take the initiative.
- Posthumous Character: Her death casts a shadow over much of the plot of Season 2 and 3.
- Sacrificial Lion: She's a main character in all but name, making it all the more shocking when Barry kills her to get away with his crimes. It establishes both how ruthless Barry is and that Anyone Can Die.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: She delivers a pretty impenetrable response to Barry's assertion that they're not that different.Barry: Janice, you can, because we want the same thing. We, we wanna be happy. We want love. We want a life. And we're doing it, Janice. We're the same.Moss: But we're not. We're not the same, Barry. 'Cause I'm a cop and you're a fucking murderer.
- Surrounded by Idiots: She rightfully takes this view since most of her colleagues really are that stupid. It's most noticeable with the two techies, who are lazy morons seemingly incapable of doing their actual job.
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: An upstanding woman who just wants to get to the bottom of a few brutal murders. She would be one of the protagonists if the one she was after wasn't Barry himself.
- Token Good Cop: A curious example, as she is introduced first and we only get to see the scale of the others' problems in comparison later, but overall she is presented as the only reliably honest and competent member of the LAPD. Her partner Detective Loach is a perpetual sadsack who can be a competent detective but is revealed to be shamelessly corrupt and murderously selfish; Detective Dunn is well-meaning but ineffectual; Detective Simmer is a lazy moron who refuses to actually work; and Chief Krauss is a gullible fool who has absolutely no idea what he's doing. The rest of the LAPD is regularly presented as cartoonishly incompetent, such as a SWAT team mistaking the unarmed, helpless patrons at a restaurant for gangsters and viciously beating them senseless.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: She's an upstanding, good-natured woman who is murdered by Barry so he can escape punishment for his crimes.
John Loach
Detective John Loach
Portrayed By: John Pirruccello
Detective Moss's partner, who assists her in the murder of Ryan Madison and several others, finding a link to one of the actors, Barry Block.
- Asshole Victim: It is really hard to not cheer when Ronnie kills him with a kick to the face, snapping his neck in the process. Considering how much of an asshole he had been at that point, and the fact that he was going to kill Barry and make it look like he had a gun, it was cathartic to watch.
- Bait the Dog: He comes off as a Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist at first, but it's eventually revealed that he's only after Barry to blackmail him into killing his ex-wife's lover out of petty jealousy.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Initially just an amusing and reliable sad sack who seems like a Hero Antagonist, he reveals himself to be a petty, self-absorbed, and angry man who's willing to kill to solve his problems.
- Bumbling Sidekick: Janice is a very competent cop, whereas Loach is a perpetual sadsack still preoccupied with his wife's divorce. After her death, however, Season 2 reveals that he's actually very competent.
- Corrupt Cop: Oddly enough, not as corrupt as you might think. He only wants to use Barry to kill his wife's lover... and when he thinks the job is done, he tries to kill Barry to Make It Look Like an Accident.
- Green-Eyed Monster: He blackmails Barry to kill Ronny simply because he's jealous his ex-wife has started a relationship with the man.
- Hero Antagonist: In Season 2, he now knows Barry is an assassin but cannot prove it. Becomes less heroic when it's revealed he just wants Barry to kill the man who stole his wife away.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He's grumpy, but it seems like Loach genuinely wants to see justice done and avenge Janice's death by capturing Barry. However, it's revealed he's only doing it so he can blackmail Barry into killing his ex-wife's new boyfriend out of jealousy.
- Neck Snap: In "ronny/lily", he receives a kick to the face. The force of which snaps his neck and kills him. Oddly enough, this is not done by Barry but by a Taekwondo master named Ronnie, someone Loach was paying Barry to kill and who was sleeping with his ex-wife.
- Not So Above It All: As it turns out, he isn't the grumpy yet good-hearted lone detective seeking justice for Moss: he's an absolute mess of a human being who only wants to find Barry so he can blackmail him into killing his wife's new lover.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: Loach is played as a joke of a cop throughout season 1, but in the wake of Detective Moss' death he proves to be frighteningly competent. He tracks down Fuches and arrests him when he continues to do hitman work without Barry and then manages to catch both men and have them dead to rights to being arrested. If justice for Moss' death had been his actual motivation for arresting Barry, then Loach would have been the hero of the story that brought Barry down.
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Come Season 2, he's after Barry, but he's just doing his job and he's working alone to get Moss' killer. It's then averted when it turns out he doesn't care about Moss more than he cares about getting Barry to kill his wife's lover.
Mae Dunn
Detective Mae Dunn
Portrayed By: Sarah Burns
Loach's partner after Moss has been killed.
- Advertised Extra: Credited as a main cast member in Season 3 despite still being a minor character with no individual narrative focus.
- Hero Antagonist: Like Moss before her, she's a likable and sympathetic person who just so happens to be on Barry's tail.
- Nice Girl: Is hapless, but a genuinely nice woman who is kind to Loach's ex-wife after Loach and his ex-wife's boyfriend seemingly kill each other. It is one reason that both other characters and the audience often underestimate her.
- Smarter Than You Look: Comes off as a cheerful naive woman but is more savvy and capable of reading Barry than she looks.
Charlie Simmer
Detective Charlie Simmer
Portrayed By: Cameron Britton
An incompetent LAPD detective.
- The Ditz: He's a slack-jawed moron who can barely be bothered to do his job.
- Lazy Bum: He's almost always playing video games instead of doing his job, and refuses to put in even the barwst minimum of effort. When tasked with accessing Hank's lipstick cam, he realizes it needs an adaptor and then proceeds to spend the next day slacking off instead of simply buying it.
- The Load: While Loach is genuinely helpful to Janice in spite of his numerous hang-ups, Simmer is just a useless moron. He doesn't actively sabotage Janice through his incompetence, but his refusal to do his job drags on her investigation into Ryan's murder.
United States Marines
Chris
Chris Lucado
Portrayed By: Chris Marquette
Barry's best friend and a fellow ex-Marine.
- Bad Liar: After he reveals to Barry his wife doesn't know where he is, Barry's reaction immediately has him lie desperately that she does know.
- Boom, Headshot!: Barry shoots him in the forehead point-blank, staging it like a suicide.
- The Cameo: Briefly appears in Barry's beach hallucination in "candy asses".
- Cluster F-Bomb: Drops a lot of these in conversations with his military buddies.
- Fatal Family Photo: Chris's status as a father makes it all the more heartbreaking when Barry murders him to cover his own ass.
- Freak Out: After being forced to shoot a Bolivian to save Barry's life, he loses it and tries to convince Barry that they should turn themselves in. He quickly backpedals, but it's too late.
- Have You Told Anyone Else?: He falls on the wrong end of this, telling Barry that he told his wife he was just going to the gym. When he realizes Barry is about to kill him, he backtracks and says that actually, he DID tell his wife he was going to talk to Barry, but it doesn't help him...
- Killed Mid-Sentence: "Wait, wait, WAIT-!"
- Miles Gloriosus: Downplayed example, he likes to hang out with fellow Marines like Barry and Taylor who have been in combat and shares their camaraderie, but turns out he only did logistics. This is foreshadowed at the carnival when he proves to be a terrible shot at a target that's mere feet from him.
- My God, What Have I Done?: He's horrified when he kills one of Cristobal's men in self-defense, and he decides to turn himself in afterwards. Unfortunately, Barry won't let that happen.
- Never Suicide: Barry frames his death as a suicide.
- Nice Guy: He's a friendly, polite family man and one of the few war veterans shown to be genuinely well-adjusted.
- Only Sane Man: He's the only ex-Marine on the show not to be visibly suffering from extreme psychological trauma, and the only one to have adjusted well to civilian life. We find out just before his death that he handled logistics, and had never actually killed anyone.
- Sacrificial Lion: The first innocent person Barry kills to protect his new life.
- Walking Spoiler: His true importance isn't clear until very late in the season.
Vaughn
Vaughn
Portrayed by: Marcus Brown
A former Marine and a mutual friend of Taylor and Chris.
- Blood Knight: He eagerly joins Taylor on his bum-rush of the Bolivians and takes as much joy in violence as he does.
- Flat Character: He doesn't get much characterization outside of being Taylor's equally brutish and dumb friend.
- Multiple Gunshot Death: He's riddled with bullets by Cristobal's men during Taylor's bum-rush.
- Too Dumb to Live: He eagerly joins Taylor's suicidal bumrush, and is shot dead for it.
Albert
Albert Nguyen
Portrayed by: James Hiroyuki Liao
A former Marine who served with Barry; an incident in Korengal involving him triggered Barry's first rampage. Albert is initially only seen in flashbacks before appearing in person in season 3; after leaving the Marines, he has since become an FBI special agent assigned to help the LAPD in finding Janice Moss's murderer.
- Badges and Dog Tags: A former U.S. Marine who became an FBI agent after his discharge.
- Genius Bruiser: While we haven’t seen him display his skills in combat, he is a trained United States Marine. After his discharge, he became an FBI agent, which suggests he is a fairly intelligent person since the FBI doesn’t usually hire morons to become special agents. So, tough enough to have been a Marine plus smart enough to become an FBI agent qualifies him as such.
- I Owe You My Life: Albert initially has a positive opinion of Barry because Barry saved his life in Korengal, and is hesitant to believe Barry is a murderous hitman because of this. After he realizes Barry undoubtedly is a murderous hitman, Albert doesn't even turn him in, but instead yells at him to do better.
- Scars Are Forever: He has a very prominent scar on his left cheek, caused by getting shot in the face while on a mission in Korengal.
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: He is a levelheaded, intelligent old comrade of Barry's who, unlike the LAPD, approaches the investigation with clarity and common sense. That the person he's chasing is his old friend Barry is played for Dramatic Irony.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: After confronting Barry at the end of season 3, he disappears and is never brought up again.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: He confronts Barry after discovering that he’s the murderer he has been tasked with tracking down. Rather than take him in, he reminds Barry that he is capable of doing good and is not an irredeemable monster, but that he must stop killing people or else he’ll have no choice but to bring him to justice.
Citizens
Ronny
Ronny Proxin
Portrayed By: Daniel Bernhardt
An Olympic Medal winning martial artist. Currently dating Loach's ex-wife.
- Bullying a Dragon: Barry thinks that the threat of death will be enough to drive Ronny out of town with no questions asked. He didn't count on Ronny being a martial arts expert and stone-cold badass who proceeds to squarely kick his ass.
- The Determinator: He simply refuses to die, no matter what Barry does to try and take him out.
- Extremity Extremist: He's a Taekwondo champion and so his fighting style is heavily focused on devastatingly powerful kicks which are strong enough to snap a man's neck.
- Rasputinian Death: Is brutally gunned down by the police after they see him seemingly attack Loach unprovoked. All this after Barry crushed and crudely fixed his windpipe.
- The Stoner: He is first introduced lighting up a blunt before entering his home. Even after he thinks he has knocked Barry out, the first thing he does before dialing 911 is light up yet another blunt. It’s possible that the only reason he wasn’t able to beat Barry in a fight is that his senses were dulled from being high.
Lily
Lily Proxin
Portrayed By: Jessie Giacomazzi
Ronny's daughter.
- Ambiguously Human: Yes, really. Barry and Fuches openly question if she's human or something else.
- Ax-Crazy: Acts downright feral once Barry seemingly kills her father, stabbing him multiple times and even biting a chunk out of Fuches' face.
- Badass Adorable: Gives Barry more difficulty in a one-on-one fight than anyone else in the series. Including her father, a martial arts expert.
- Extremely Protective Child: As Barry comes to find out, hurting and/or killing her father will make her go nuts on someone.
- Unstoppable Rage: After Barry seemingly kills her dad, she goes mental on him, viciously attacking him with her fists, feet and anything she can get her hands on before she runs out of steam and exits the house.
Jim Moss
Jim Moss
Portrayed By: Robert Wisdom
A retired Vietnam vet and the father of deceased LAPD Detective Janice Moss.
- The Ace: He outsmarts just about everyone he comes in contact with.
- Always Someone Better: Although Fuches can actually be good at manipulating people, he’s not as good as he thinks he is. Jim on the other hand, is actually a master of psychological warfare who managed to convince his own interrogator in Vietnam to commit suicide. He proves his superior skills by tricking Fuches into thinking he’s interested in killing Barry as a way to turn him over to the police. Interestingly, while Stovka killed himself when talking to Fuches, he already was deeply psychologically troubled beforehand and did it on his own accord. Moss on the other hand, actually persuaded a sane and stable individual to commit suicide.
- Anti-Hero: Having lost the life of his daughter at the hands of Barry, Jim will stop at nothing to get retribution for his actions, even if it means using morally dubious methods such as psychological torture and manipulation of others.
- Batman Gambit: With Gene Cousineau's help, Jim lures Barry into going inside his house to kill him, as part of a successful set-up to have Barry arrested.
- Boring, but Practical: He manages to arrange the capture and arrest of both Fuches and Barry, simply by alerting the police in advance and luring them to locations where they can be easily surrounded.
- Chekhov's Gunman: He's introduced two-thirds of the way into Season 3 as part of Fuches' "revenge army", and ends up responsible for both Barry and Fuches himself being arrested.
- Cool Old Guy: A retired Vietnam vet and probably the most moral character in the show. He loses a bit of the "moral" part when he starts employing dubious methods like psychological torture, but he still primarily remains concerned with bringing Barry to justice.
- Creepy Good: He has a sinister aura around him, considering that he was a psychological warfare officer and a skilled manipulator in his own right. But he's firmly on the side of the angels.
- Dramatic Irony: He spends most of his on-screen time trying to avenge his daughter's death, even getting Barry arrested. At one point, he has Barry tied up in his garage and at his mercy, but Barry's muttering leads him to reexamine the evidence. He eventually exonerates his daughter's killer, at least in the public eye, and pins the blame on her boyfriend, who had also been trying to avenge her.
- Hero Antagonist: Probably the biggest challenge that Barry has faced and his actions are shown in a sinister light, but he is clearly on the side of good. Downplayed in season 4 as he mentally breaks Lon O'Neil and threatens Gene over their interview
- Living Lie Detector: When he approaches Gene to ask about Barry, he instantly realizes Gene is lying to protect him. After interrogating him, he gets Gene to change his mind and help the police put Barry behind bars.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In which the good deed in question was a brief moment of mercy. After Barry's genuine emotional breakdown from Jim's psychological torture, Jim begins to reexamine what he knows about Barry. Him following Barry's mutterings, coupled with Gene's own stupid decisions prior, leads Jim to conclude that Barry was being manipulated Gene and that Gene was really responsible for killing his daughter. This would lead to Jim unknowingly exonerating the man who killed his daughter.
- Papa Wolf: He's trying to find whoever killed his daughter and bring them to justice.
- Retired Badass: Jim isn't afraid of dangerous criminals like Barry Berkman, and manipulates someone as manipulative as Monroe Fuches.
- The Stoic: Unless he's interrogating you, Jim always retains his calm.
- Too Clever by Half: He is incredibly competent at what he does, and that unfortunately causes him to make a costly mistake at the finish line. He had Barry at his mercy, but the ease at which he captured him and Barry's very pathetic breakdown lead to Jim second-guessing if he had caught the actual culprit behind his daughter's death or merely just a disposable triggerman. Thanks to Gene engaging in some public self-aggrandizement at the worst possible time prior to Barry's capture, Jim comes to believe that Gene had orchestrated the whole thing and that Barry was just a pawn.
- The Vietnam Vet: He became a POW during the war, even managing to convince his own captor to kill himself.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: While Jim's quest to bring down Barry is righteous, his ways of doing so reach the point of borderline derangement.
Sam
Sam
Portrayed By: Joe Massingill
Sally's abusive ex-husband from her younger years. Although he only shows up in the show for a brief time in the second season, his impact on Sally's background plays a major part in her development and motivation as an actor.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: When he first shows up he seems polite enough, which might cast some doubt on whether or not Sally's recollection of events are true. Then his true colors are revealed and you realize that he's exactly the man Sally said he was.
- Domestic Abuse: He was physically and emotionally abusive to Sally during their marriage. He hasn't gotten any better in the present, still threatening and belittling her.
- Faux Affably Evil: He can seem very nice and polite when he needs to be but it disappears the second he's defied or doesn't get his way.
- Hate Sink: Once the Nice Guy facade is dropped and Sam's true nature is revealed any redeeming qualities he might have go right out the window. He threatens Sally with legal action for using his abuse of her in her act, taunts Barry over their past relationship and is overall revealed to be the horrible, abusive person that Sally remembered.
- Never My Fault: He still refuses to admit to his abuse, insisting that Sally is lying or just being dramatic, and acting like he's the victim of a smear campaign.
- Small Role, Big Impact: He only physically appears in the show for two episodes in season 2, but he is the major reason for some of the major issues that Sally struggles with. Furthermore, it's not until after Sally meets with him one last time that she decides to change her scene with Barry mid-performance because she doesn't want to appear weak, even if it's not the way they rehearsed or how the scene actually happened.
John (SPOILERS)
John Berkman Jr.
Portrayed By: Zachary Golinger (child), Jaeden Martell (teenager)
Barry and Sally's young son.
- Ambiguous Situation: John knows what kind of man his father really was, but he still grins a bit at the end of Barry's biopic, which erroneously depicts Barry as a Tragic Hero. Is he happy that the movie gives him a positive image of his father to latch onto, or is he laughing at just how wrong the movie got his father?
- Earn Your Happy Ending: In the series finale, John and Sally reconcile and develop a better relationship with each other, and they manage to move on to normal, happier lives in the wake of Barry's death.
- Homeschooled Kids: As a result of Barry and Sally trying to stay off the grid. He's shown attending a public high school after Barry's death, indicating that he settled into some degree of normalcy afterwards.
- In the Blood: He's inherited some of Barry's personality traits. Sadly, he also seems to have inherited his father's emotional issues as well, judging by how he got into a fight with his friend.
- Secret-Keeper: He knows that his father is not the tragic victim of Gene that the world now thinks he is, but can never tell as it would bring unwanted attention to himself and his mom.
- Troubled Child: As a result of Barry and Sally isolating him so their cover isn't broken, John has a very limited and rather distorted perception of the world. In the end, however, he's aged into a normal, functioning young man in the years after Barry's death.
- Walking Spoiler: He isn't introduced until near the very end of the series, and his existence spoils multiple big twists.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: He initially wants to play baseball, but after Barry shows him videos of players being fatally injured in the sport, he develops a phobia of the game and starts having nightmares.
