Nowadays, Scott Wolf is busy starring in Doc, where his character saves lives. But 13 years ago, he played the guy who was taking lives in a three-episode arc on NCIS.
In the series, Wolf played Jonathan Cole, a member of the special ops team, the Phantom Eight, in Season 9 Episodes 1 “Nature of the Best,” 12 “Housekeeping,” and 24 “Till Death Do Us Part.” He was a killer — and he tried to add Tony (Michael Weatherly) to his list of victims, but failed — but he ended up sacrificing himself to save members of the team when a bomb was delivered to the Navy Yard in the Season 9 finale.
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“NCIS was great. Mark Harmon, salt of the Earth, generous, really made me feel welcome there. They told a very cool story with my character. Oftentimes when you come in and play a character like I did — he was a villain, he was like this rogue ex-Navy Seal who wanted to shoot people and harm people. But they wound up sort of redeeming him in the end,” Wolf notes to TV Insider.
He recalls Cole and Gibbs’ (Harmon) argument about who would defuse the bomb: “In the end, time’s running out, and he has this moment with Mark Harmon where he’s like, ‘You got to get out,’ and he’s like, ‘No, no, no, I’m staying.’ And he smiles, and he’s literally martyring himself. He’s going to die to save people. And for a show like that that doesn’t do that with characters very often, it’s kind of incredible.”
Wolf has starred in numerous shows, notably Party of Five, Everwood, and Nancy Drew. However, “I did three episodes, I don’t even know how long ago, and I might get stopped for that in airports as much as anything else,” he reveals. “It’s a very popular show, obviously. But there was something about the fact that they made a little arc out of that character, and he wasn’t a one-off, shoot people and go away [character].”
What he does recall is having to reshoot the first scene in which he had to fire a gun (after safety checks). As the character, “I’m an ex-Navy Seal. I’ve shot thousands and thousands of rounds, and so I need to shoot two people, and they shot it in super slow motion, and as I was coming out from behind the wall, they shot it, and the gun went off, and it was a lot,” Wolf shares. It was late on a Friday night, and everyone watched it back on the monitor, and at first, he thought, “Oh, this actually looks really cool. I look like sort of Navy Seal-ish. I might’ve been voted least likely to be a Navy Seal in high school.” But he reacted after firing the gun “because it was extremely loud, and I hadn’t fired the gun before,” and so he wasn’t surprised when after the weekend, the director had him reshoot the scene.
“I was like, yeah, I figured that we might be having this conversation,” Wolf says. “So the shot that’s in the show, I had a chance to kind of compose myself to know that this thing was going to explode next to my face and not look like someone who had never fired a gun before.”
Do you remember Scott Wolf’s arc on NCIS? What did you think of it when you first watched? Let us know in the comments section below.
NCIS, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS