“We’re geeks about NCIS,” Michael Weatherly says while he and Cote de Pablo discuss their upcoming new series, a spinoff about their characters, Tony and Ziva, and their new rewatch podcast. And that’s evident in their tones and answers. These two people love this franchise, love their characters, and love working together.
On the Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch podcast, the two are going through Season 3 episodes—they’ve done 25 and have a multi-year contract—and, through their work with Paramount+ (the home of their new show, NCIS: Tony & Ziva), CBS, and Spotify, it’s an “organic way of looking back and then looking forward for the new show,” Weatherly tells TV Insider.
“More than anything, it’s just Michael and I, two friends, talking about a really fantastic experience, one that came with its own set of challenges, but really at the end of the day, it’s a celebration of a very successful franchise where Michael and I became great friends and now we get the great big pleasure of actually going out to Budapest, working together again on Tony & Ziva,” shares de Pablo. “We thought it would be a great thing to be able to do this as a way to sort of engage the fandom before we started working on our show. Little did we know that everything would align in such a perfect way that this happened and then the show happened simultaneously.”
The two are now gearing up to begin work on the spinoff—filming begins in July, as they’ve said on the podcast—and Weatherly notes that other than his appearance in NCIS‘ tribute episode to the late David McCallum and Ducky (Tony joined Brian Dietzen‘s Dr. Jimmy Palmer in autopsy for the final scene), he hasn’t worked in over two years. (Weatherly starred in Bull after his Season 13 departure from NCIS.) De Pablo last played Ziva in a Season 17 arc after the end of the Season 16 finale revealed she’s alive.
“Michael and I talked about my return in 2019, and I remember calling because we already had the idea of Tony and Ziva and [playing these characters again],” de Pablo shares. “And I said, ‘Do you think this would get in the way?’ And he said, ‘No, this would not get in the way.’ And so in a way, I got a green light from him.”
Their plans to reprise their roles together also came into play with the tribute episode for McCallum, which Weatherly says he “was very honored to do and proud to do as somebody who was there with David when we were doing the JAG spinoff episodes.”
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“He said, ‘I really want to go back.’ And I said, ‘Well, if you go back, I’m not going to go back because we can’t both be back because then it gets in the way of the spinoff,’” de Pablo recalls. “So I said, ‘I know that you had a very special relationship with McCallum, and I think if you really want to do it, you should go, which means I have to sit this one out.’ So we’ve worked from the get-go for many years as a partnership, which means at times we have to confide in each other and sort of ask permission to do things in order to allow the other one to sit down or for things not to get in the way of the final objective, which is really to make this show and to give the audience the element of surprise on that show.” (Showcasing their partnership? Weatherly’s response: “I agree with everything she said.”)
Now that they’ll be playing Tony and Ziva again, de Pablo says she and Weatherly have talked a lot about the question of, “‘How do you think it’s going to be?’ I think we have to allow it to be what it’s going to be, and we don’t know what that is.” That’s the surprise for both of them. “We know that we have a past. We know that we have worked together. We know that we are friends, we know that we have gone through really good times, really challenging times in the show, as friends, in life, and now we’re going to be working together and hopefully we’re going to be drawing from all of that,” she continues. “And we have to understand these characters, much like Michael and Cote, have evolved.”
Adds Weatherly, “And what kind of an actor are you? What is Cote de Pablo going to feel like when she puts on the clothes and starts doing a scene with her daughter?” He knows that everyone behind the scenes will be supporting them, “but I have no idea what Tony DiNozzo is like until I get on set and I’m in that costume and I look across at my scene partner and they say action. I’m looking forward to that, the real energy and exhilaration of acting with one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with, Cote de Pablo.”
He notes that while the two of them are different, what they have in common is “we want the scene to be great and we will make sacrifices, at some cost, sometimes,” and de Pablo interjects with, “by the way, we do not agree about the final outcome of what that should be and that ends up in the scene.”
Cliff Lipson/CBS
Weatherly picks right up with, “that becomes the conflict of the scene. I think Tony and Ziva have a similar new fact pattern that has emerged in the show. Tony and Ziva should really be called Tony & Ziva & Tali because their priority now, both of them, is Tali, not themselves or each other—of course couples get into their petty business, but I think the dynamic that emerges is going to be a really brand new one. And I have no idea what that’s going to feel like. I can’t wait.”
De Pablo is also enjoying that she and Weatherly are executive producers on Tony & Ziva. “We are a part of making decisions. It doesn’t mean that we make the decisions or the final decision, but we are a part of this collaborative effort that goes into making a show. And that’s been a real surprise and kind of fun to be a part of,” she explains. “It’s also made me respect actors and all the people that are making this thing happen. We’re getting, for example, a taste of castings and these actors, are very good and it’s very hard to choose and sometimes there are things that have nothing to do with the performance.”
They can’t share much yet about the new show, but de Pablo does reveal that Tali, Tony and Ziva’s daughter, will be played by a European actress. And Weatherly thinks that for anyone who comes int other new show without having watched NCIS first, “you’re going to think, ‘Wow, this is like Mission Impossible with a couple.’”
And it’s expanding the NCIS franchise, both to Paramount+ from CBS and globally, which was important to the pair. “This show, for many years, was a very sort of American show. That’s how people viewed it. When we started traveling, we realized that this show was not just an American show. It appealed to a massive international market. So what we’re doing now and what we always planned to doing was putting the show outside of the US to tap into that international world and give it that thing that we always wanted, the je ne sais quoi,” says de Pablo.
For them, it’s about answering questions the fans have, like “what happened to these characters and where are they now and who are they now and where are they living and all that,” she continues, promising, “We’re going to answer a lot of those questions.” This show is also allowing the two do something they love (travel), though both are, as Weatherly puts it, “a couple of homebodies at heart.”
While we wait for Tony & Ziva to premiere, there is still the aforementioned podcast—and just like the audience is learning new facts about NCIS, the hosts are learning more about each other. The podcast has given Weatherly “a deepening of the love and respect that I have always had for Cote,” while de Pablo admits, with a laugh, that she finds herself “a little offended” if she hears a story she didn’t know before.
Something that both of them know and listeners will have to wait to discover? The last special guest, which they want to leave as a surprise. But in addition to the already announced Sean Murray, Dietzen, Eric Christian Olsen, Daniela Ruah, and Jon Cryer (Sasha Alexander and Rudolf Martin have appeared in episodes already released), also stopping by are Robert Wagner, Joe Spano, and Rocky Carroll.
Also coming up: more fun with the segments of the podcast, which include a context section about the world the day episodes aired, fan Qs, and Gibbs’ rule of the day. “Cote and I were happy if you just put a microphone in front of us and we talked about the show for 25 hours, we could do it, but getting at that structure allows a little bit of give and take,” says Weatherly. “It brings the audience in with the fan questions and it sort of challenges us again, to not just sit in a puddle of our memories.”
De Pablo shares that they do continue to have fun with Gibbs’ rules. “For example, we’ll be like, ‘Trust no one, what do you think about that?’ And then we get into a whole sort of existential analysis of what trusting means and have you ever lost trust in someone? And so everything’s just sort of like a gateway to a bigger question,” she says. “That’s what Michael and I really always wanted from the get-go. We, of course, love the show and it’s a celebration of the show, but we also wanted to reserve the right to be able to go from one branch to another very organically and explore different subjects that are really interesting to us in a very sort of fluid friendship way, like, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’”
Are you listening to Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch? What are you hoping to see in NCIS: Tony & Ziva? Let us know in the comments section, below.