With how much time the "Criminal Minds: Evolution" team spends working on cases and pursuing leads, it can be easy to forget that many of these characters have well-developed personal lives and family ties outside of their profession. A.J. Cook's Special Agent JJ is no exception, as the BAU profiler has a loving husband and two sons at home — Henry and Michael. Notably, both of these kids are actually played by two of Cook's real-world children, Mekhai and Phoenix Andersen respectively, in the original
series.
With regard to Henry in particular, it took until Season 1, Episode 8 of "Criminal Minds: Evolution" for the boy to actually show up in the sequel series. Titled "Forget Me Knots," the episode finally gave fans another appearance from JJ's elder son in the flesh. However, his return ended up catching many viewers off-guard, as the character has gotten quite a bit older since his last appearance in "Criminal Minds."
Season 1, Episode 8 of "Criminal Minds: Evolution" features a long-awaited check-in with JJ's family, entailing another appearance from Henry. As it turns out, the kid has visibly aged quite a bit since his last appearance in "Criminal Minds" Season 15. He's taking after his mother too, as he demonstrates a respectable knack for profiling.
Considering that after a modest time skip beyond the original series, it makes sense that Henry would be older, but fans were nevertheless caught off guard by just how much he's grown.
"The way I gasped when I saw JJ's Boys," tweeted. "They are so big now! Henry is taller than JJ, he's a whole teenager! I feel so damn old." Many viewers were reminded of Henry's scenes as a little kid and marveled at how recent those old scenes still felt. "Henry being 14 still spooks me out a little, he was just cosplaying as Spencer Reid and being scared of Halloween monsters," another tweeted.
Henry's growth is especially impressive when considering that Mekhai Andersen has been portraying the character from the
. When A.J. Cook gave birth to Andersen in 2008, it wasn't long before he ended up appearing as a newborn Henry on "Criminal Minds." With his sporadic appearances in the franchise over the years since then, one can effectively witness Andersen and Henry grow all the way from a newborn to a teenager. That's quite the time capsule.
