‘I Felt Like Such A Failure’: NCIS’ Cote De Pablo Recalled Time When She Didn’t Have Her Lines Memorized For A Scene With David McCallum
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If you’re familiar with Cote de Pablo, then chances are you first learned about her from NCIS, the long-running CBS procedural that’s returning for Season 22 this fall on the 2024 TV schedule. Pablo came aboard to play Ziva David in Season 3 following the death of Sasha Alexander’s Caitlin Todd at the end of Season 2, and she stuck around as a series regular for eight seasons. However, she got quite a scare during one of her earliest NCIS appearances, as she didn’t have her lines memorized during an important scene with David McCallum’s Donald “Ducky” Mallard, which led to her feeling like “such a failure.”
De Pablo recalled this uncomfortable moment in the episode of Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch where she and co-host Michael Weatherly, who plays Tony DiNozzo in the NCIS-verse, were talking with Eric Christian Olsen, who played Marty Deeks on NCIS: Los Angeles and is now producing the Matlock reboot. Weatherly started off the story by saying:
But here's the story I want to tell about Cote de Pablo, and it's her first season, her first couple of episodes. We're shooting two stages, two different episodes simultaneously, as you do. And she's finishing a scene, and she's still learning what a call sheet is, where it is on the thing. So she finishes the scene, and it's a long scene, and you finish in coverage… That is the most stressful part, is your coverage… All of a sudden another AD appears with the pink call sheet, and they're like ‘Cote, so soon as you're done with your coverage, they're waiting for you on Stage D.’ And she's like, ‘What are we doing?’ And they're like, ‘We’re doing the four-page autopsy scene with Ducky. He's waiting. They're ready, they're just going to change your top. You're going to keep the same pants on because we've got because we have to go.’
Apparently Cote de Pablo wasn’t aware that this autopsy scene was going to be shot on this particular day, and immediately after she was done shooting another lengthy sequence for this unnamed NCIS episode. De Pablo then took over telling the story on the podcast, explaining how disappointed she was that she didn’t already have her lines memorized. She came from the world of theatre and needed “at least a couple of hours” to be able to recite her dialogue, but the NCIS people told her it didn’t work that way on the TV show and suggested she just look over the script a few times. So that panicked her, but fortunately, she caught a break:
Eric, actor's nightmare… A monologue going into autopsy circling a body, delivering exposition… I went home and I cried and I cried and I cried because I felt like such a failure… So I try and I go in and I'm like, ‘Oh, this is this is miserable. I can't do this.’ And at the time, and I remember the director, he comes up to me and goes, ‘Oh God, it doesn't matter. You could literally just be saying 1, 2, 3, 4. It's such a wide shot, it doesn't matter what comes out of your mouth. So I go, ‘Oh yeah, well, that's a great idea.’ ‘Action!’ ‘1, 2, 3…’
That’s right, somewhere in NCIS Season 3, there’s a scene with Ziva and Ducky in the autopsy lab, and while you’ll hear her giving dialogue in this wide shot, she was actually counting just like the director suggested. Then the actress spoke with some of the show’s producers to clear things up, although then gave her a different reason to be stressed:
Then the producers, who are the best, Mark Horowitz and Shills and all those guys, they came down and they realized I genuinely didn't know. And to be fair, I wasn't given the second unit thing. So I genuinely didn't know… I was game, I would go home, I would study. I was like the biggest geek. I was like a theatre geek. I was like, ‘What are my lines?! Drill them, drill them!’ So they're like, ‘Look, Cote, we're going to start with the scene tomorrow morning, go home, learn it and we're just going to pick up. Don't worry about it.’ I didn't sleep 'cause I was like, now I'm like all paranoid, and I go in the next day and I do it.
It worked out in the end for Cote de Pablo, and she went on to play Ziva David on a regular basis for nearly a decade. Then at the end of Season 16, Ziva, who was thought to have died towards the end of Season 13, resurfaced, leading to de Pablo making recurring appearances in Season 17. Now she’s teaming back up with Michael Weatherly for the upcoming spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which will follow the title characters going on the run in Europe.
As for NCIS Season 22, it premieres Monday, October 14, the same night that the Leroy Jethro Gibbs-focused prequel NCIS: Origins begins airing. You can stream all the NCIS franchise’s shows with a Paramount+ subscription, and it’s important to note that this platform will be the exclusive home for the Tony & Ziva spinoff.
