’NCIS: Tony & Ziva’s Michael Weatherly Wants to Keep You Guessing About Tiva’s Relationship: “There’s This Strong Sense of Fate and Destiny and Star-Crossed Lovers”

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for NCIS: Tony & Ziva.]

In the Paramount+ series NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which works as a sequel to their time on the original NCIS, Tony (Michael Weatherly) and Ziva (Cote de Pablo) are co-parenting their daughter Tali while trying to keep things as uneventful as possible. But when Tony’s security company is attacked, the former couple goes on the run across Europe as they’re forced to figure out how they can work together again after living separate lives. Through flashbacks, we get to see what’s happened between them and where their tension has come from, at the same time they learn to trust each other again.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Weatherly discussed what he loves most about this new series about familiar characters, what made it so easy to jump back into a role he hasn’t played in a few years, earning their episode four kiss, why he prefers not to clearly define every little thing, all the mirrors that are being held up to Tony and Ziva, shooting the sequence with the fleet of self-driving attack cars, what it’s been like to have De Pablo by his side throughout this experience, and whether Tony has a harder time trying to save the world or co-parenting a tween.

Collider: One of the most fun aspects of this series is that we get to see these characters who we are very familiar with in a world that really has a very different feel to it. It feels like this fun Mr. and Mrs. Smith action comedy. Was that something you found exciting about doing this?

MICHAEL WEATHERLY: Yes, absolutely. My instinct is to go back and talk about what a TV show is and where it comes from, and it’s really radio with pictures. The radio was one step better than reading. It was like somebody reading for you. Once movies came into your house and the television was formatted to either be radio, they would tell you a story and act it out, but it’s going to be short, or it was vaudeville where it was like Abbott and Costello, and it was routines and slapstick and sketch shows. Soap operas came out of radio. I was really not intending to ever do procedural drama in my career. As a consumer, I liked thirtysomething in the 80s. When we did Dark Angel, that was really a relationship show where Max and Logan had this conflicted thing. I always loved relationship shows. I always loved the dynamics, with that push and pull and the impossible relationship where they can’t be together and you’re like, “How does that work? How are they doing it?”

Procedurals really fulfill this idea that you can tune in for an hour, get the mystery, there’s a dead body, there are clues, and if you’re lucky, you get some great character development. It’s not essential. Dick Wolf has shown us that you can do a hundred shows where it’s like FBI: Miami. When we started NCIS, the biggest joke was that there were no relationships. There was a dead body, there were clues, there was a red herring, and then they’d satisfy the viewer. But when Cote [de Pablo] came onto the show and Tony and Ziva started having this really tacky, in the adhesive way, not in the cheesy way, relationship, Don Bellisario was the first person who drove up to the set with his cigar and said, “Kids, this is a real thing.” All of that is to say that I’ve done a lot of television, I’ve told a lot of stories, and I’m a student of it. I love everything from Fellini to Magnum PI, and I don’t think they’re that different, actually. It’s just your temperance level.

There’s one episode called “Truth or Consequences” that’s a non-linear time presentation written by Jesse Stern and directed by Dennis Smith, who does the last block of our show but this was back in 2009, and it’s about Tony believing that Ziva is alive when everyone’s left her for dead. Where I come into this new show, that’s the core. Tony has this almost ethereal, unshakable belief that they are fated to be together, so it’s almost like a spiritual quest. But the world keeps telling him that that’s not so, and events and circumstances tell him that. So, when we were doing the show, we still had to solve a mystery every week, but there was all this energy between the characters. When Cote left, I lasted a few more years. I said at the time, “I think Tony’s story has run the full course, so I would like to go and do something else.” I knew I had to leave the mothership in order to let the audience create a new Tony DiNozzo. That way, people can wonder, “What would he be doing now?” So, nine years later, this is what he’s doing.

Michael Weatherly and Cote De Pablo Quickly Fell Back Into Place as Tony and Ziva for Their New ‘NCIS’ Series

“We knew there was a collision course that these guys were on.”

Even though you’d had some time away from the character, was it easy to jump back in?

WEATHERLY: Cote and I found it right away. We jumped into each other’s rhythms with this new thing, and we were able to go really deep, really fast because we’d had so much work together and history together. Even though the environment was brand new, and the directors and all the actors around us were brand new, we were locked in on the emotional journey. That’s what we had talked about building with the show. We knew there was a collision course that these guys were on. There’s this strong sense of fate and destiny and star-crossed lovers. We were both like, “Yes, that’s what we want to do,” with the impossible love affair and they have a kid. We love the Mr. and Mrs. Smith part of it. The audience has 200 episodes of Tony and Ziva that they can watch on Paramount+ that informs everything that happens, which is a fantastic sequel rather than a spin-off. It’s like Logan and the X-Men thing, where you had Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman going off and doing a road movie.

If you’ve watched the show, you do have all that history, but at the same time, you’re also giving us flashbacks with moments of them together. And in episode four on the boat, after everything with the wedding, we see them actually kiss in present day. What was it like to get them there and to really earn that moment?

WEATHERLY: It’s really personal for each audience member, if they’re shipping from the mothership. I think everyone is going to have their own interpretation and project onto what is happening and why it’s happening. It would also happen on set. I would be playing an important beat, like maybe a proposal beat, and everyone had a different interpretation of what that moment was – the writers and the director, and then Cote, and then me. I was like, “Guys, I’m the one playing the beat.” My big thing is, “Don’t tell me how to think and don’t tell me how to feel.” You can tell me what to do, like pick up the pen or take a sip of the drink, and you can tell me what to wear and what to do with my hair, but thinking and feeling is mine, at least for the time being. It hasn’t gone full Minority Report on us yet.

That, to me, is the great gift that this show does. It’s subjective. Even the truth is not trustworthy all the time. We might tell you that someone is something, and then it turns out that they’re not. We’re constantly questioning not just our own roles, but other people’s roles. And our daughter is questioning our relationship with each other and our relationship with her. That’s really fun. And then, for the other audience, which are the people that might be thumbing through Amazon and go, “Tony and Ziva? Is that like Tony and Tina’s Wedding?” They watch the trailer and they go, “Well, fuck, I’ll watch that. That looks fun.” And then, they have a couple of gummies and they go on an adventure with Tony and Ziva and they’re like, “Yippee ki yay!” This is not your granddaddy’s Die Hard. It’s an adventure, but it gets you in all these places. If you’re a functional human being, you will find places in this show to project into and find that it resonates with your own life. That was a big thing for me, to keep it open and not really clearly define everything.

Michael Weatherly Says That Tony and Ziva Will Be Forced to Look at Themselves Throughout the Season

“There are all these mirrors being held up to them.”

We have the flashbacks, so we do see things we didn’t know before, and we see Tony and Ziva in present day, but we also get to know them through their interactions with some other couples. Boris and his girlfriend are hilarious, and Tony’s girlfriend and her unexpected husband leave an impression. Did that feel like a fun way to teach us more about what they’re like together?

WEATHERLY: Yeah, and we talked about that when we were doing it. There are all these mirrors being held up to them. Even Tony’s best friend is a relationship that’s threatened by his relationship with Ziva. You’re so right, and that continues throughout the series, this twinning where Tony and Ziva keep seeing couples of all various stripes, and they’re forced to look at themselves, over and over and over again. The writers on this had a lot of fun. It’s very complicated, and not just the story, but the nonlinear presentation of the flashbacks. It’s handy because it bears repeat viewing. When you get to the end of 10 episodes in October, you can take a day off, but then you should go back and watch all 10 again.

I never thought I would see an entire fleet of self-driving cars chasing after you in the street. What was all that like to shoot?

WEATHERLY: We had a nice budget for this show, and we had an extraordinary location in Budapest. There was an episode of the mothership in Season 4, called “Driven,” where there was a self-driving car. There was a plot where somebody got killed by a self-driving car, and I love that it was a little bit of a callback to the mothership. Because they’re in this ridiculous but life-threatening circumstance, she’s telling him what to do, and he’s like, “I understand you’re telling me what to do, but can you just do it with kindness?” If DiNozzo does something nice, it’s like it’s an accident. I love watching their screwball, 1930s vibe. I grew up in a really combustible Irish Catholic family, and there was a lot of confusion and chaos and ADHD, combined with a healthy amount of alcohol on the part of my parents, so confusion feels natural to me. I did also notice that my Harrison Ford voice came out. The murder cars brought out many things.

It makes it feel like this is the movie version of the TV series because everything just feels bigger.

WEATHERLY: The argument could be made that this is all just DiNozzo’s fever dream because he always thinks he’s in a movie anyway. It’s a cinematic reference upon a cinematic reference. He’s a pop culture, Gen X boy, as we learn.

It’s one thing to play a character for a long time, but you’ve also done so alongside your co-star, Cote de Pablo. You know your characters, each other’s characters, and this relationship so well. What is it like to have somebody by your side like that?

WEATHERLY: Cote and I are very different, obviously, in many ways – literal, figurative, and all kinds of different ways. But we do have a belief in synchronicity and we each have an openness to magic. That is a central aspect of our communication. I don’t learn my lines because I’m terrible at it. I absolutely adored Terence Stamp, and may he rest in peace. I would binge everything from Billy Budd to Far from the Madding Crowd to Modesty Blaise to The Hit to Superman. I love Terence Stamp. And he was saying that he was terrible at rote memorization and that being relaxed is really important. If you’re trying to remember something, it’s the opposite of being relaxed. Everything is clenched. Your esophageal sphincter is clenched. Everything is just clenched. It took me about a decade to figure out that that’s not my friend. Don Bellisario helped me loosen up and speak from my reality and my perspective.

And then, when I met Cote, she’s such a talented, trained professional that she is truly someone who has the technique and the training, but also speaks from a true place. I benefit so hugely from having her next to me because I’m frankly not a very talented actor, but she makes me so much better. Left to my own devices, jokes land flat or I think I’m doing something, but nobody else sees it. We will self-correct while we’re doing a scene. If I keep playing the beat and she keeps running over the moment, I’ll be like, “Okay, this isn’t working. I have to try something else.” It’s an alchemy that you cannot figure out on paper. The letters NCIS don’t determine success or failure for this show. Tony and Ziva are the reasons for the show. So, no country is safe, which was originally the title of the show. That was our working title for when we were pitching and talking to John McNamara. He actually came up with that, and you find out what that means in the first episode.

In ‘NCIS: Tony & Ziva,’ Tony DiNozzo’s Life Revolves Around His Daughter

“The priority shift was so massive that it’s essential to his being now.”

Do you think Tony has a harder time trying to save the world or co-parenting a tween?

WEATHERLY: I think he loves being a part of Tali’s life. Tali’s mere existence, her presence in his life, changed him in an instant. On some quantum, subatomic, invisible level, Tony DiNozzo became a dad and that meant the priority shift was so massive that it’s essential to his being now. Everything that drives the story is really about Tali. I don’t think that’s hard for him. That’s just him. It’s just what he has to do. He’s frustrated and he’s probably not as good as he thinks he is at it. Saving the world, been there and done that. Like all of us, the biggest adventure for Tony DiNozzo is figuring out who he is and making himself whole.

I have a friend whose husband passed away, and the last words that he said to her when he took her hand were, “We’re square.” I thought that was so incredible because you can only get to that place with someone else if you’re square with yourself. So, DiNozzo’s journey and his arc with saving the world, or being with Ziva in some way, or being a good dad, or being a good businessman, he’s learning, over and over and over again, and Gibbs was his first real teacher. He’s getting better at being himself. If we’re lucky enough to make more, I think that’s the journey. I have no idea what happens when Tony DiNozzo becomes a fully actualized, integrated human. Holy shit, what might that be like?

NCIS: Tony & Ziva is available to stream on Paramount+. Check out the trailer: