Michael Weatherly as Tony Dinozzo, Cote de Pablo as Ziva David and Isla Gie as Tali In NCIS: Tony & Ziva, airing on Paramount+.Jason Bell/Paramount+/Supplied
Two decades after defining one of TV’s great slow-burn romances on NCIS, Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo are back for Paramount+’s NCIS: Tony & Ziva. The international spinoff trades procedural crime scenes for serialized storytelling and second chances, particularly as these two soulmates (and parents!) find their way back together.
It’s a spinoff several years in the making, and one that Weatherly and de Pablo fought for. Now, as executive producers and stars, the pair reflects on what brought them and their characters to this point, how they hold up in modern television and why this chapter feels like an emotional reconciliation — on-screen and off.
You both played these roles during formative times in your careers. Coming back to them now, what did you learn about yourselves, not just as actors, but as people?
Michael Weatherly: Oh, there’s a lot there. When we first met back in Season 3 of the original show, I was basically living above the store – this little apartment near the studio in Santa Clarita. We were all together all the time: me, Cote, Pauley Perrette, Lauren Holly. It was like Friends meets NCIS. There was no line between life and work. And coming back 20 years later, that’s a very different adventure.
Cote de Pablo: It really was special, though we didn’t realize it then. Everyone was picking up cues, vibing, flowing. There was urgency, comedy, love… it just worked. When I left in 2013, and then Michael in 2016, there was unfinished business between the characters. So to revisit that now, there’s been a sense of healing. That’s the word we both used, “healing.” It felt like reconciling something we’d lost.
The original NCIS was procedural, but this new series is serialized and more emotional. Did that change the way you approached the characters?
de Pablo: We’re giving fans a little bit of what they craved during the mothership. We lived in this structure that served the procedural world really well, and it lived within this dysfunctional family. There was a lot of love there and it was a wonderful thing. But this doesn’t live within that structure.
Weatherly: As you go with these characters through each episode, you keep meeting other couples, and each couple that appears is almost like this fun house mirror reflection back at Tony and Ziva about themselves. That’s really an invitation for the audience to think about coupling and your own marriage or divorce, or whatever dysfunction, and that’s very different than, there’s some clues in a dead body, and we’re going to have a mystery, and a red herring.
TV romance has evolved since Tony and Ziva’s early days. How does their story fit into today’s landscape?
Weatherly: Love is love. That never changes – not since Greek tragedy or Three’s Company, honestly. But now we can explore it with more truth and complexity. What’s different is the context. We’re not hiding behind exposition or clues anymore. This show is about emotional honesty, and with Cote, there’s no faking it. She’ll eat your lunch if you’re not fully present.
De Pablo and Weatherly at a fan screening event in September. Both actors are also executive producers of the series.Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
You’re both producers on the new series. Were there certain moments or dynamics you knew had to be included?
Weatherly: We’ve been talking about this for years, during COVID, before COVID, meeting with directors, brainstorming stories. We’ve been mad scientists in trying to make this work.
de Pablo: It’s not something that magically happened. It’s something that we’re passionate about. We knew we had to rely on the thing we had, and that’s its own thing. It morphs, it changes. There’s this complicity, there’s 20 years of inside jokes, drama, crying, laughing, you know? We have so many stories and I’ve watched him go through so much life. It’s a big thing most people don’t have professionally.
What do you think keeps NCIS resonating after all these years and spin-offs?
Weatherly: It goes back to Don Bellisario and Mark Harmon. Don knew how to build a world where people took their jobs seriously but still had a light touch. And Mark, he really knew what an ensemble cast was, when it clicked, when it really worked. And he wanted that for us.
de Pablo: I wasn’t around for Year 1 and Year 2, but Michael has said Mark was instrumental in Tony being Tony. By the time I met Michael, he was already in it and pushing boundaries. He was blowing things apart. He was playing with the text. He was doing all of these things that in many ways you wouldn’t be allowed to do, but Don and Mark certainly embraced it, and they pushed him forward and he became a fan favourite.
After everything, the show, the time apart, the reunion, how does it feel to be back together?
Weatherly: It’s like when you hear songwriters talk about where a song came from. You can sit in a studio all day long and write and write and write, but it doesn’t matter how great the chords are if you don’t have that weird Frankenstein lightning bolt that wakes up the monster.
de Pablo: We sat down with our monster. We are the monster, together. It’s just one big monster.
This interview has been edited and condensed.