Michael Weatherly Would’ve Needed Someone to ‘Put a Gun to My Head’ to Do ‘NCIS: Los Angeles’
NCIS spawned one of many spin-offs when it inspired the creation of NCIS Los Angeles. But Michael Weatherly initially felt it was a bad idea to overlap with the second series.
Michael Weatherly didn’t want an ‘NCIS’ crossover with ‘Los Angeles’
NCIS had a successful experiment with spin-offs that started with NCIS Los Angeles. As its title implies, Los Angeles followed a group of federal agents hunting down dangerous criminals in the city. Starring LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell, the show was a success from the start. Its debut episode was the second most watched show at the time, only behind NCIS‘ season seven premiere.
Although he seemed excited about the prospect of an NCIS spin-off, Weatherly felt it was a bad idea for Tony DiNozzo to crossover with the other show. He believed he worked best alongside his familiar crew.
“I won’t do a crossover, unless they put a gun to my head,” Weatherly once told TV Fanatic. “It won’t help them, and my character is really only valuable in the context of Ziva, Gibbs and McGee. Robbed of his context, that guy might really be inappropriate.”
However, Weatherly seemed to change his tune years later. He did a crossover episode with Los Angeles in the 2015 episode “Blame It on Rio.” This time, a Weatherly who was a bit older seemed to embrace being in another different environment on the show.
“They’re a peak experience for someone like me. For 13 years, besides a tiny part here and there, I’ve just been playing DiNozzo. So having other experiences with the character is super important to me. Plus, I love to see how DiNozzo travels, how he’ll be in different settings. On NCIS, he can only do so much,” he said in a resurfaced interview with TV Insider.
At the same time, he harbored similar concerns appearing on Los Angeles that he had several years prior.
“To be honest, I was a little nervous about going into NCIS: Los Angeles because I wasn’t sure how DiNozzo would be received—not just by the team, but by the audience,” Weatherly said. “Would he mesh with them? Look, I’m the same age as LL Cool J and I think we were the oldest guys on set next to Miguel Ferrer! But that’s the funny thing. Rather than having to play a faux youth like on NCIS, I was playing a little creaky on NCIS: L.A. And I enjoyed that Eric and Daniela were all really athletic and beautiful around me. It was just really refreshing. I felt like ‘Oh, s***, am I aging out of the game?’ Which I realized is totally a DiNozzo paranoia.”
How Michael Weatherly’s parents reacted to the ‘NCIS’ spin-off
Weatherly was especially impressed by the show’s premise and immediate success. So much so that he doubted a younger version of himself would’ve believed how the NCIS franchise turned out.
“It’s been the kind of year,” Weatherly once told NJ. “That, if seven years ago, you had come up to me and said, ‘Michael, I just went with the Ghost of Christmas Future, and I was mostly paying attention to my own stuff, but I happened to notice that there’s an NCIS: LA with LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell, which is a spin-off of your show, and it’s the No. 1 new show on television, and your show is the No. 1 show on television,’ I think I would have bet you maybe $40,000 that you were lying. Not a million dollars, but I would have bet you something big — like a car.”
But Weatherly’s parents assumed that Los Angeles meant their son’s own time on the show was coming to a close. And even offered some friendly advice as to how Weatherly might improve his job prospects just in case.
“My parents thought immediately that meant I must be losing my job to someone,” Weatherly said. “After the second episode aired, my mom called from Rhode Island. She said, ‘It’s a big year. You don’t want to maybe bring it down like two inches off the waist?’”
