'I Wrote A 10-Page Email': NCIS' Michael Weatherly Lays Out How He Developed Tony DiNozzo Following JAG Debut
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NCIS (which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription) has become one of the longest-running scripted TV shows of all time and launched a franchise that includes four spinoffs, with two more on the way, but it started out as a spinoff too. The JAG Season 8 episodes “Ice Queen” and “Meltdown” served as a backdoor pilot to introduce Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo, Pauley Perrette’s Abby Sciuto and David McCallum’s Donald “Ducky” Mallard to the world. However, in the interim period between those episodes airing and NCIS premiering on CBS, Weatherly spent a lot of time developing Tony’s deeper characterization, which he compiled into a “10-page email.”
The actor reminisced on the earliest days with his NCIS character while speaking with Ziva David actress Cote de Pablo and Anthony DiNozzo Sr. actor Robert Wagner in the latest episode of Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch. Weatherly started off by talking about how JAG and NCIS creator Donald Bellisario got in touch with him after the JAG episodes were shown to the public:
So this is a funny story. Don Bellisario… we're making the JAG episodes, which is the spinoff episodes, and that's how Mark Harmon and and David McCallum and Pauley Perette and I were the core four from the original. And after the two episodes aired, I flew to London and I was in this hotel room in Covent Garden, and I got an e-mail from Don and he said, ‘I’m trying to write this first script of the season and I can't hear your voice.’ You know, writers hear the characters’ voices. And I guess I hadn't impressed him very much, he couldn't hear my character in the scenes. And he said, I don't want it to just be run-of-the-mill. Do you have any ideas? You have any thoughts on your character?’ Well, never ask me what my thoughts are on something. I wrote a 10 page e-mail that was an exegesis of high order.
Michael Weatherly had already been around the TV block quite a bit before JAG and NCIS came his way, with him being best known at the time for playing Logan Cale in Dark Angel. Playing Tony, however, marked his biggest gig yet, so when Donald Bellisario asked him about his thoughts on the character, he took that assignment seriously and wrote out the backstory he’d crafted in his mind in a long email. Weatherly continued:
I talked about how DiNozzo lost his mother when he was a child. He was raised by his father, who had been It Takes a Thief, had been kind of a con man thief and an unreliable male figure, which is why DiNozzo became a cop, which Don had already established. But I wanted to give all this perversity to the character and I wanted to build in all this conflict. The central conflict to me for a young man is his relationship with his father.
Robert Wagner first appeared as Anthony DiNozzo Sr. in the NCIS Season 7 episode “Flesh and Blood,” and sure enough, the father and son’s relationship was initially strained after years of estrangement. However, over the course of Wagner’s many guest appearances, Sr. and Jr. were able to patch things up and grow closer, and he even got to meet his granddaughter in the Season 13 finale, the same episode when Michael Weatherly departed NCIS. Going back to the podcast, when Cote de Pablo asked Weatherly if Tony’s relationship with his father “mimics a little bit” of the relationship he had with Gibbs, he responded:
Gibbs was a replacement father, but once you meet this guy, once you run into to Anthony DiNozzo Sr., then all of a sudden I knew it was just going to be magic because you illuminate that relationship by coming in and being a little bit flippant and deflective and using humor as a as a device to defend yourself. But underneath it, you see there's all this emotion and all this other stuff going on.
Michael Weatherly reprised Tony earlier this year for a surprise appearance in the NCIS Season 21 episode “The Stories We Leave Behind,” which paid tribute to the late David McCallum. But that was just an appetizer, as he and Cote de Pablo are reuniting for the Paramount+ exclusive spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which is shooting in Budapest now. While it’s unlikely Robert Wagner will reprise Sr. in that show given his age and that he hasn’t acted in several years, hopefully there’ll be a mention of what he’s up to these days. Maybe that’s something Weatherly could hash out in an email!
Meanwhile, NCIS Season 22 will premiere Monday, October 14 on CBS. That same night on the 2024 TV schedule will also have the Gibbs-focused prequel NCIS: Origins. We’ll keep you apprised on more details on NCIS: Tony & Ziva as they trickle in.
