Criminal Intent Split Its Cast

During filming in 2004, D'Onofrio made some headlines for passing out twice in the same week on set, requiring brief hospitalization on both occasions. It wasn't illness, strictly speaking — it was inordinate amounts of stress. Having come from a film background, D'Onofrio struggled under the high demands of a weekly television drama, as well as trying to pursue other projects and maintain a family life. To put it this way: between 2002 and 2010, D'Onofrio was in sixteen projects that were not Criminal Intent. Three of them were released in 2005 alone.

Criminal Intent's leaner, meaner cast had a major drawback: much greater demand of its principal actors than Law & Order or its sister show, Law & Order: SVU, both of which boasted much larger casts, which allowed the workload among cast members to be distributed more evenly. In an interview with Uproxx in 2018, D'Onofrio explained how profoundly challenging it was to work on Criminal Intent. "I had to stay ahead two days on dialogue," he said. "To actually have to be learning scenes two days before you shoot them while you're shooting other scenes that you learned two days before that." He referred to the fourth-season filming of Criminal Intent as the "rock bottom" of his life; he also lost two family members during that time, and was not given leave from the set to attend one of the funerals. He explained his mindset at that time in stark terms: "I had a lot of anger, and angst, and total exhaustion." 

D'Onofrio largely reflects positively about his time on Criminal Intent (he did sign back on for that final season, after all); he enjoyed his character and the friendship he built with Erbe, but it came at a steep cost.