Kirsten vangsness criminal minds

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It's been a little more than a year since the hit CBS crime drama Criminal Minds wrapped its season run with the aptly titled finale episode, "And in the End. She's flirty, sassy, funny, and fierce — a survivor, who endures losing her parents at the age of 18, getting caught by the FBI as an elite hacker known as "The Black Queen," to say nothing of the countless traumatic incidents she experiences as an agent.

Garcia is played by Kirsten Vangsness, who undoubtedly was central to Garcia's popularity as a character. In fact, as Vangsness told Parade in a interview, Garcia was only supposed to be in one episode, but Vangsness's chemistry with hunky costar Shemar Moore who plays Derek Morgan flipped the plans of the writers. She went on to star in the second-most episodes of any other cast member — of the show's total episodes, behind only Matthew Gray Gubler, who's the only cast member to appear in every episode.

Vangsness also starred in the show's first spin-off, the short-lived venture Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, and appeared in the second spin-off, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders , which ran from The actress's road to the Criminal Minds franchise from her days as a young girl, simply pondering her future, was both a long and quick journey.

Here's her transformation. A young Kirsten Vangsness began acting in grade school, partly to overcome shyness. As she told reporter Matt Pomroy , her weight and "strange" appearance made it difficult for her to fit in when she moved to a new school. Her grades slipped, and when her parents made her choose between shop class and acting class, she chose acting — "because," she said, "I hated the idea of shop even more" — and wound up getting her best grade in a long time, reinvigorating her outlook, overall.

She initially stuck to theater, in part because she felt that people on television didn't look like her, so she thought theater was a better fit.

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She struggled for a while, joking that she thought she'd be living on "cat food" forever. At one point, she had a day job as a substitute teacher. Her first formal roles were in two short films, in and When she got the part in Criminal Minds, Vangsness was about 33 years old.