Michael Weatherly Was Sick of the Roles He Was Offered Before ‘NCIS’
NCIS wasn’t Michael Weatherly’s first network show. He’d built his film resume up slowly prior to the procedural with diverse but unsteady television work. But NCIS didn’t just give him the job stability he was looking for. It gave him a chance to play the type of character he always wanted to.
Tony DiNozzo was the type of character Michael Weatherly always wanted to play
It took a while before Weatherly found a character that he could relate to. When he got into acting, he cited actors such as Cary Grant and Tom Hanks as direct inspirations.
“I saw every Tom Hanks movie on opening day — which is how I came to Joe Versus the Volcano. That was the catalyst [to become an actor]. My girlfriend Betsy thought I was a lunatic to move to New York. And clearly Betsy was on the money,” Weatherly once told TV Guide.
But when he started acting professionally, Weatherly wasn’t getting the kind of roles that his idols had. After doing guest roles in a couple of television projects, Weatherly noticed a pattern between his characters that he wasn’t a fan of.
“I started out doing soaps and by the time I got to Dark Angel and some other jobs, I was kind of in a box, having played this Randy Blandy-type character for years,” Weatherly once said in an interview with Venice Mag. “Kind of like a department store mannequin that talks. When I first became excited about acting, Tom Hanks and Cary Grant really appealed to me, but when I started acting, none of those kinds of roles were available. That style of role wasn’t around. So I was always getting projects, whether it was Charmed or Dark Angel or Ally McBeal, that were about a central, powerful woman and I would be playing these guys who were always doing the complaining.”
This changed after he landed DiNozzo. Weatherly was able to infuse the character with his own natural humor, giving him a role that he could be proud of.
“Part of the energy of the character originally did come from me because I wanted DiNozzo to be fun, just so I could jumpstart myself out of the rut I was in as an actor at the time,” Weatherly said.
Michael Weatherly shared that playing Tony DiNozzo was exhausting
Weatherly may have some things in common with DiNozzo. But he was clear that Weatherly drew on a certain side of his personality to inform the part, and that he wasn’t DiNozzo all the time. Even Weatherly couldn’t maintain DiNozzo’s energy indefinitely.
“For one thing, it is absolutely exhausting to hold onto that character for ten months at a time, always being a bubbly, shallowish, fratboy type. And I’m really just not that guy, politically or emotionally or in any other way,” Weatherly said.
But this meant a lot of people who only knew Weatherly from his NCIS performance were quite surprised getting to know the real him.
“But I know that people do assume that I’m just playing myself, that I’m just being myself when the cameras roll,” Weatherly added. “They think that I’m that dynamic guy all the time, so the first time that I get serious with someone, they get very confused and think that I am kidding! I can only imagine what Steve Martin’s life was like for about three years when everyone thought that he was The Jerk. And I do recognize that, all things considered, this is really a great problem to have.”
Weatherly confided that his wife wasn’t at all surprised by his true demeanor, however. She hadn’t seen NCIS prior to their relationship, so she wasn’t influenced at all by the show when dating Weatherly. But after watching a couple of NCIS episodes, Weatherly assumed she didn’t care much for her husband’s alter ego.
“She prefers the version of me she gets at home,” he said.
