For 10 seasons, Marisa Ramirez has portrayed Detective Maria Baez on the police procedural drama “Blue Bloods.” Partnered with Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) — eldest son of Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) — since Season 3, she’s even made it to at least one of the famous Reagan family dinners over the years. But her life on the show has consisted of more than just working in the 54th Precinct.
Baez was previously a member of the NYPD’s Joint Bank Robbery Task Force. Outside the job, she was in love with a married man in Detective Jimmy Mosely (Johnathon Schaech). Baez has also had to deal with having an older brother, Javier (Kirk Acevedo), who’s a recovering addict and DEA informant, one who eventually dies saving her life in a raid on the drug cartel he’s infiltrated.
Much like Maria Baez has a complicated backstory and prior history to her time on the show, Ramirez has been acting long before taking on the role. With 37 credits on her resume, courtesy of her IMDb page, here’s what Marisa Ramirez did before starring on “Blue Bloods.”
Like many actors, Ramirez got her start in soap operas
Prior to appearing on the primetime police procedural drama, Marisa Ramirez got her start in daytime drama. Her first acting credit is on the soap opera spinoff series “Port Charles,” in the role of Gia Campbell. Beginning in 2000, she reprised the role on the main series, “General Hospital,” playing Gia for 109 episodes. Her character was among the show’s younger crowd, joined by the likes of Emily Bowen-Quartermaine (Natalia Livingston), Nikolas Cassadine (Coltin Scott), Lucky Spencer (Jacob Young), and Elizabeth Webber (Rebecca Herbst).
Gia Campbell first showed up in 2002 as a new character with her mother, Florence Campbell (Lynn Moody). They come to Port Charles because Florence wants to surprise her son, Marcus Taggert (Réal Andrews), who’d been a recurring character since the mid ’90s. Given that she had a heart attack in the airport, which prompted his sister to show up on the scene, having dropped out of Columbia University, we’re guessing he was plenty surprised.
Gia Campbell at one point was engaged to Nikolas Cassidine, but, as is often the case with soap opera romances, it didn’t work out. Having originated the character, Ramirez left the show in 2002, at which point Andrea Pearson took on the role until Gia left town in 2003.
She starred in the zombie thriller All Souls Day: Dia de los Muertos
After departing the world of daytime drama, Marisa Ramirez appeared in a project that was slightly less frightening, trying to survive an attack by the undead in “All Souls Day: Dia de los Muertos.” Ramirez appeared in the 2005 zombie thriller as Alicia, one half of a college-aged couple who take a vacation south of the border into Mexico. She’s joined by her trusty significant other Joss, played by Travis Wester of “EuroTrip.”
Things start going wrong for the couple when they accidentally run into a funeral procession in a small town. The main problem is that it wasn’t a funeral procession; in fact, they just screwed up the town’s annual Day of the Dead human sacrifice, meant to appease the spirits of the dead. Everyone knows when the spirits of the dead are not appeased, bad things happen. In this case, they rise up from the grave to do the damn thing themselves and kill the living.
Only two critics reviewed “All Souls Day” — which aired on Syfy in 2005 — which is not enough for review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to bother doing the math for a critics score. For the sake of argument, Scott Weinberg of DVDTalk.com gave it 3 out of 5 stars, saying he’d “rather sit down with a knowingly tacky little horror indie like ‘All Souls Day’ than a shameless husk of a studio remake like ‘The Fog.'” David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews gave the film 2 out of 4 stars, saying “the film’s positives are ultimately undone by some seriously uneven pacing and a screenplay that places far more emphasis on backstory than necessary.” Middle school math says the least common denominator is 20, with the two scores averaged at 11, which makes for a 55% critics score.
Marisa Ramirez returned to daytime television for a role on The Young and the Restless
Making her return to daytime drama, Marisa Ramirez took on the role of pubic relations pro Carmen Mesta for 72 episodes of “The Young and the Restless.” She popped up in Genoa City to help get Jabot Cosmetics out of a jam when Gloria Fisher (Judith Chapman) contaminated some of its face cream. Having initially planned to save the day herself, Gloria is instead jailed for murder when her stunt results in the death of Andrew Gibson’s (Will Schaub) wife Emma. Carmen is brought in to help with the PR nightmare of the company’s product accidentally killing someone, much to the ire of company namesake Jack Abbott (Peter Bergman), though his dislike for the situation doesn’t stop him from having an extramarital affair with her.
As Paul Williams (Doug Davidson) found out while looking into her background, it wasn’t the first time Carmen had an affair with a married executive, as she’d left a previous job with a tidy sum prior to arriving in Genoa City. Attorney Michael Baldwin (Christian LeBlanc) tried to use that tidbit as leverage against Carmen to get her to drop her charges against Drucilla Winters (Victoria Rowell), who believed Carmen was having an affair with her husband Neil Winters (Kristoff St. John) and destroyed her clothing, later violating a restraining order. Carmen’s time on the show ends in her murder, though not at the hands of anyone you’d expect based on the above. Marisa Ramirez also showed up for a few episodes as Ines Vargas, Carmen’s doppelgänger cousin who comes to town to stalk Drucilla.
She appeared in the hospital drama Mental
After another romp through the convoluted world of daytime soaps, Marisa Ramirez must have thought it wise to focus on mental health, because that was the nature of her next major recurring role on television. On “Mental,” she took on the role of Dr. Chloë Artis, a resident at Wharton Memorial Hospital, where series protagonist Dr. Jack Gallagher (Chris Vance) arrives as the incoming Director of Health Mental Services. In all honesty, Chloë thinks she’s above her current position, but Jack offers her some insight into the benefits of psychiatry. Which is good, because Chloë probably needs a coping mechanism, given the relentless pursuit of Dr. Arturo Suarez (Nicholas Gonzalez), despite the fact that she has made it abundantly clear that she is homosexual.
Creative partners and siblings Deborah Joy LeVine and Dan LeVine — responsible for developing “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” and creating “The Division” — created “Mental,” which was produced by Fox’s Latin American subsidiary, Fox Telecolombia, and filmed in Bogota, Colombia, despite being set in Los Angeles, California. The show was cancelled after a single season, comprised of 13 episodes, as reported by TV Series Finale.
Ramirez previously appeared on a police family drama in Against the Wall
Two years before she joined the cast of “Blue Bloods,” Marisa Ramirez got some unofficial method acting training in the form of her role on “Against The Wall,” the Lifetime channel’s family police procedural. Ramirez took on the role of Lina Flores, a detective in the Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Department, a gig universally derided as “the rat squad” in pretty much any law enforcement drama, as its members are tasked with looking into fellow cops and potential police misconduct. Flores is partner to series protagonist Abby Kowalski (Rachael Carpani), a fourth-generation member of law enforcement whose father and three brothers are also among the Chicago Police Department’s ranks. Sound familiar?
A job working with Internal Affairs is always going to cause friction with fellow members of law enforcement, given the nature of the assignment. But when your great grandfather, your grandfather, your father, and your three brothers also happen to be cops, it makes family events pretty awkward. Not only are you trying to live up to your family’s law enforcement legacy, but you’re tasked with policing fellow police officers. Like when you show up to the scene of an officer-involved-shooting, only to then find that the officer involved is your older brother Richie (Brandon Quinn). The family dynamic was ripe for dramatic storylines, but “Against the Wall” only lasted a single season.