It’s rare for a TV show to celebrate its 20th anniversary and still be on the air, but NCIS is one of those lucky few. Two decades ago, just a few months after being established in a two-part backdoor pilot on JAG, Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs and his team started leading their own stories on CBS. But before Harmon was selected for the role, it turns out Harrison Ford and some other A-listers were tossed out as options for bringing the special agent to life.
This was revealed in an oral history published by THR commemorating NCIS’ 20th anniversary, with Charles Floyd Johnson, executive producer on JAG and NCIS, recalling the process of how Gibbs was cast. After Amy Reisenbach, CBS Entertainment president, commended the JAG writers for writing “real people,” Johnson said:
I know Harrison Ford was a name that everybody thought about for Gibbs because he was so perfect. But I don’t think it ever got further than, it was a name thrown out.
You have to remember that the TV landscape looked a lot different in the early 2000s compared to now, in that it was rare for a thriving movie star to agree to star in a TV show. At this point in time, along with retaining his well-deserved popularity as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was also appearing in movies like What Lies Beneath and K-19: The Widowmaker. Peter Golden, the former head of CBS casting, acknowledged this in the article, noting how even if the chances weren’t good for looping in someone of Ford’s caliber, that didn’t stop the people behind a show like JAG from putting him on “the list.”
But it didn’t just end with the man who’s now playing Thaddeus Ross in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While Susan Bluestein, the NCIS casting director, didn’t recall Harrison Ford being thrown into consideration, she did remember plenty of other noteworthy names, saying:
I don’t remember Harrison Ford. There were names like Alec Baldwin, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Kevin Bacon, Tom Berenger, Val Kilmer, Charlie Sheen, Aidan Quinn, Patrick Swayze. We did not make offers to those people. We just investigated.
All these men would have been major scores for NCIS, and to be fair, some of these actors did go on to lead/play important roles in TV shows, including Baldwin in 30 Rock, Bacon in The Following and City on a Hill, and Swayze in The Beast right before he died. Charles Floyd Johnson also mentioned that Silence of the Lambs and Daredevil’s Scott Glenn was considered “very strongly” for Gibbs, and Susan Bluestein added that he was being considered for Donald “Ducky” Mallard too. Ultimately Glenn, as well as passed on participating in JAG and NCIS, and while Andrew McCarthy of St. Elmo’s Fire fame also talked with co-creator Donald Bellisario about playing Gibbs, nothing ever came of that.
As far as Mark Harmon goes, he was already a well-established TV presence from shows like St. Elsewhere, Reasonable Doubts and Chicago Hope, so leading a procedural was well within his wheelhouse. Bluestein also had history with Harmon, having cast him to play John Dillinger in a TV movie about the outlaw, and Golden recalled, once the actor met with Bellisario, they “hit it off.” Harmon would go on to play Gibbs for 19 seasons of NCIS, exiting in the episode “Great Wide Open,” and he also made four guest appearances in the spinoff NCIS: New Orleans.
It remains to be seen if Mark Harmon will ever reprise Leroy Jethro Gibbs, especially considering that as of this past July, there’s allegedly some behind-the-scenes drama around his potential NCIS return. Still, if you’d like to view any of the hundreds of episodes he did appear in, those can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription. NCIS itself has been renewed for Season 21, and while we wait for concrete details about what it holds in store, look through our 2023 TV schedule to see what’s currently airing or will be soon.
