‘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
I feel for her.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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Connoisseur of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, MonsterVerse and Doctor Who lore, Adam is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend. He started working for the site back in late 2014 writing exclusively comic book movie and TV-related articles, and along with branching out into other genres, he also made the jump to editing. Along with his writing and editing duties, as well as interviewing creative talent from time to time, he also oversees the assignment of movie-related features. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism, and he’s been sourced numerous times on Wikipedia. He's aware he looks like Harry Potter and Clark Kent.