Stephen Amell Reveals He Auditioned to Play NCIS: Origins’ Young Gibbs
Before Stephen Amell suited up for NBC’s upcoming Suits: L.A. spinoff, he had his eye on another offshoot.
During a new episode of the podcast Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum, Amell revealed that he auditioned for the CBS prequel series NCIS: Origins just two days before he tried out for Suits: L.A.
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“My actual focus that week was on an audition that I had on Wednesday [for NCIS: Origins],” Amell shared. “It was playing the younger version [of Leroy Jethro Gibbs],” a role which eventually went to Austin Stowell.
Despite coming off a premium cable series in Starz’s Heels, Amell said he “was excited by the prospect of, OK, this is a network show. This is pilot season. This doesn’t really happen that much anymore,” he said.
“And so this came in, and I thought that the audition went extraordinarily well. I got great feedback,” Amell added. “I hadn’t looked at the sides for Suits L.A. yet, and then I found out on Thursday afternoon, after getting not just good feedback, but, like, good intel, like, ‘We think this is actually gonna move forward,’ all of a sudden, it was dead, and I felt like someone, somewhere along the line, had, like, c–k-blocked me… So I didn’t know what was going on, and I was really frustrated.”
Amell then had a “breakdown” on his way to his Suits: L.A. audition the following Friday and “was really mad” after a difficult week, but channeled those emotions into his performance.
“I walked into that audition just with, really, kind of no fear,” Amell said, noting that he “tried to be a lot looser and more spontaneous than I think probably a lot of other people were, because this guy’s a lawyer. This guy’s supposed to be the smartest guy in the room, but, concurrently, I just figured everyone was going to be stone-cold serious, so let’s just have a little bit of fun.”
Suits: L.A.: Everything We Know So Far
Amell, eventually, landed the part of Ted Black, a former federal prosecutor from New York who has reinvented himself representing the most powerful clients in Los Angeles.
The new series has “a great hook on the end of the first episode,” Amell shared, adding that the pilot “comes across like a great episode of Suits, but it has a little bit of a different feel.”
In the end, “retrospectively, I got the job that I was supposed to get, and everything does work out for a reason,” Amell concluded.
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