Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney episode “Hell Weak” are ahead!
“Hell Weak,” the most recent episode of NCIS: Sydney to air on the 2025 TV schedule, was a rough one for partners DeShawn Jackson and Evie Cooper. In addition to viewers learning about how DeShawn dropped out of Navy SEAL training years back, he and Evie were also hunted down by the episode’s bad guys and only barely made it out alive. This heart-racing portion of the episode, which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, involved DeShawn getting into a brutal brawn and Evie pulling off a zip line gun fight. Actors Sean Sagar and Tuuli Narkle told CinemaBlend what it was like for them to shoot these intense scenes.
Sean Sagar’s Experience Shooting His NCIS: Sydney Brawl
The actors opened up about their time working on “Hell Weak” to me ahead of the episode’s airing, which also included them sharing how they hope these events on NCIS: Sydney will affect their characters. As far as Sean Sagar goes, here’s what he started off telling me about the fight that was choreographed between him and actor Blessing Mokgohloa, who played Petty Officer Axel 'Axeman' Beysdorf:
Well, one, I have to give a massive shout out to Blessing, who was my co-star, in this moment. We had a lot of rehearsals, the stunt team again, who helped us put in countless amount of hours to get us to where we [ended up]. But I honestly couldn't have done that without Blessing’s incredible professionalism, athleticism. Like, it was a lot to put ourselves through. We would finish filming, then go off for two hours doing stunts, come back, then lunch we'll be doing stunts, come back.
Axeman and his cohort Petty Officer Sully 'Scalpel' Dunbar, played by Daniel Widdowson, were the ones who killed Peter Levinson, at a wellness retreat run by Finn McKay, who served as a Navy SEAL alongside the other three. DeShawn and Evie figured our the circumstances behind Levinson’s death, and learning as such nearly got them killed on the spot. However, Finn was able to convince Axeman and Scalpel to go with the hunting option to buy the agents some time.
Events unfolded to where DeShawn and Axeman broke out the fisticuffs against each other when their guns were taken out of the equation. Sean Sagar had nothing but positive things to say about working with Blessing Mokgohloa, which makes him account of accidentally punching his co-star a little too hard all the funnier:
And just to see it… there was a moment when we were actually doing it, and Blessing, he's a very well built individual. It was intimidating coming up against him, and in my head, I was kind of like, ‘Please, Blessing, don’t catch me with one of your punches because it's probably gonna knock me out if you do.’ And it ended up being me that actually caught Blessing, and he was just so beautiful and understanding of the art that it. Just made it one of the best experiences for me so far in my career. I did put the work in, we both did, everyone did, and I just really hope that shows on camera now.
Axeman started to overpower DeShawn in their fight, but Evie, who’d never shot another person before, brought it to an end when she fired a round into Axeman’s leg. That followed Evie’s other bout of excitement when she and DeShawn had briefly split up.
Tuuli Narkle’s Experience Shooting Her NCIS: Sydney Zip Line Gun Fight
There were zip line setups at the wellness retreat where this hunt unfolded. When Evie and DeShawn separated, the former used the zip line to distract Scalpel, using the seven rounds in the .45 she’d been given as her sole means of protection. Tuuli Narkle recalled the following to me when I inquired about this NCIS: Sydney moment:
I have to also add that our incredible DOP had created these wonderful contraptions so that I had cameras attached to my arms as I was swinging them on the zip line. We had cameras attached to helmets. It was incredible. And he'd done it all by hand, so I just want to give him a shout out. But there definitely wasn't a lot of prep. I feel like with a zip line, you just stand there and then you just got to commit, and I feel like I did that. But that level of trepidation and fear that was in Evie’s eyes as she went down that zip line, that was partly mine.
This mess all started because Axeman and Scalpel learned that Levinson had been speaking to a reporter about the death of a Navy SEAL trainee named Victor Austin four years earlier while going through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S). It turned out that Axeman and Scalpel had been giving him and the other recruits steroids, and they were determined to never let their involvement come to light. But by the end of “Hell Weak,” Scalpel was dead and Axeman was arrested, so it was another week of the good guys coming out victorious.
New episodes of NCIS: Sydney air Fridays at 8 pm ET on CBS stateside, and exclusively on Paramount+ in select international territories. There are just four episode left to go in Season 2, with this Friday’s episodes shedding quite a bit of light on Mavournee Hazel’s Bluebird Gleeson. But fans needn’t worry, as Sydney will return for Season 3.
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