Interview With Michael Weatherly From 'NCIS: Tony & Ziva' At NYCC 2025
Image Source: CultureSlate
Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David are back in their very own show, NCIS: Tony & Ziva. The show follows the two after they leave NCIS, where Tony, Ziva, and their daughter Tali are on the run in Europe, but must also find out who is after them. Michael Weatherly (Tony DiNozzo) and Cote de Pablo (Ziva David) were both at New York Comic Con to promote their show, and I had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable interview and speak with both of them about the show and the return of their iconic characters.
CultureSlate Q: What has it been like coming back to playing Tony DiNozzo?
Michael Weatherly: Very interesting. To not just come back, to go kinda behind the mask, so to speak, and get to explore some of the stuff that really when I left, at the end of season 13, I was accessing some emotional stuff that I felt was really there in DiNozzo, and so coming back to this, I was talking in the panel about how we wanted to approach the streaming platform where this opportunity would approach the characters for a more thorough examination of what makes them tick. The things I thought about was his reliance on pop culture, and why? And I think why is because he wasn’t raised really properly after his mother died, and his mother used to take him to movies, she was the reason he started loving movies, and he was 8 years old when she died, and his father was not present. He learned how the world works, what the morals of the world are, what is funny in the world, how you operate, and that's a really kind of interesting thing to realize that it's a sad little boy and all of us are sorta our younger selves, grown up. That is the reason to do it. So coming back to Tony DiNozzo is kind of a wonderful way of revisiting an old friend and spending real time with him. That’s my short answer.
RELATED:
Image Source: Getty Images
Q: So much of the show is about trust and how it's built, broken, and rebuilt. Why do you think this is the most important part of the journey for Tony?
MW: I think each of them comes at that idea from a very different place. Ziva’s trust was broken incredibly early, and continued to be broken by her father, and by her experiences in the world, and you know, if you’re going to kill people for a living, and you’re being tasked with that, you better trust that they’re having you do the right thing. Is killing ever the right thing? So, you know, her internal struggle with that is like, does she trust herself to trust the people around her? To trust a man with a baby, but she gets very close with Tony because she actually sees through a lot of his phony baloney nonsense, and for Tony, the trust is much more to do with their parents not being present, after the age of 8, and before then having a mother who he loved who was taken away. So trust for him when it comes to a woman, because his mother was the woman in his life and she abandoned him, and then Ziva “dies”, and then he finds out she had a baby and never told him, and then she comes back-” oh by the way I didn't die, I just let you think that”. So, they are equally damaged. Hers is a more obvious kind of damage, boohoo poor little rich boy kind of thing for Tony, but I think when you spend time with him, you’re like, oh, maybe there’s something I didn't think about there, maybe I just kind of thought he was a jerk, and I don't like that guy.
CultureSlate Q: So Tony and Ziva have obviously always had a really great dynamic with each other. Was it easy to get back into that?
MW: Oh yeah, that was something I think that Cote and I do very easily, which is we jump into the sandbox, we call it, and we trust each other to play deep, and play for real, like the stakes are what the stakes are, and then when the day is over and work is done, its like every once in a while, I’ll call her or she’ll call me and we’re like you were incredible, but generally we don’t because it’s like if you go for a walk in the fall and all the leaves are falling in New Jersey or something and its just unbelievably beautiful like a Woody Allen movie, like in Manhattan or something, it feels like some Easter European director filmed the most perfect day, and you haven’t taken a walk in years, and then you have that walk, you would think like wow thats the most incredible walk, but if you take a walk every single day and thats what it is with Cote. The only thing she doesn't like to say is “we know this matrix data point has these three cross sections and we got” etc, but she's better at it than I would be.
Q: So NCIS: Tony & Ziva is a love story between two people, and then it expands to be about the family they have with Tali, and the one that they built. Why do you think this was the right story to tell for them?
MW: Yeah its a great question because there are lots of different ways in to the story, and some people would ask why didnt you start with tony and ziva together and its like well we never saw them together so we cant just start with them together, and like oh yeah sorry nevermind all that stuff that happened, just gonna have them be heart to heart, running around and solving crimes. That would be a fun thing for us to do after we get most of our stuff straightened out, but we needed to get things in order, and Tali acts as a personification of their love, as children are, but she's also this bridge between them, so even if they can't communicate with each other, they know that they have this. So it comes as the most interesting story point. So that is why I think its the best angle of approach, if we’re going to be looking at these two characters, lets look at them through the lens, episode 6 was a Tali episode and we got to really see her, and then shes having flashback memories of herself as a younger child and her relationship as a younger child watching her parents fight, playing video games with her dad, when hes clearly a little closer with her than mom who comes in and is like “I thought we said no screens”. Again, I think it reveals the most about the character.
CultureSlate Q: NCIS is more of an ensemble show. How different is it filming this show versus NCIS?
MW: Oh yeah, it's totally a different game. Making this is like making a movie almost, whereas if you’re making your 22 or 24 episodes of a crime procedural drama there’s a crime, there’s clues, we have to gather those, which leads to a red herring and it’s not the guy we’re looking for and so the format and formula is very comfortable and you can put it on like your favorite jacket and each episode, even though its a new story and there might be new guest stars, it always feels a little bit like the last one or the next one. It's kind of like Oreo cookies, like Oreo cookies are just awesome. If you like your Double Stuf, I'm not going to hold it against you, but I like the classic. An Oreo cookie is a very simple construction, always satisfying. Tony & Ziva is like a smaller bag, not as many cookies in there, and each one is a little different. They’re like snowflakes, they look a little more homemade, and maybe more time was spent, and the factory didn't just spit it out. There's nothing wrong with a factory spitting out Oreo cookies, let me be really clear about that. So that is my Oreo cookie analysis of crime procedural dramas.
READ NEXT:
Latest News
Featured
