Origins’ When He Was Against Doing Network TV

Austin Stowell had to be convinced by his agent to take the meeting that led to him playing the young Leroy Jethro Gibbs of the NCIS prequel, Origins. (Mark Harmon played the character for 18 full seasons of the mothership before exiting four episodes into Season 19.)

“Network TV was not something I thought I was interested in,” Stowell explained to NCIS: Partners & Probies hosts Brian Dietzen and Diona Reasonover on the latest episode of the podcast.

The NCIS: Origins star had been “very much enjoying a quiet life” back on the East Coast after the strike at the time. “One of the first scripts that I get is for NCIS: Origins, and I think I deleted the first email because I just was not interested. I wanted to do films. I just didn’t want to do network television. I just kept saying no for years and years to network TV. My biggest fear was the commitment and not knowing who I was going to be working with for all those years,” he explained. “You do a film, if you have a rotten apple around, you’ve got 90 days, you can work through it. Where, something like [TV], it’s a huge commitment. … You don’t know what that’s going to look like and feel like.”

Warrick Page/CBS

He continued, “This self-awareness, that’s what it was. I’ll really lose my mind if I get on a job that I don’t like or can’t stand somebody. So, I was afraid more than anything.”

However, once he spoke with creators David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, who “were insistent on meeting” with him, the more he heard them talk about the character, “I realized how right I was for it and how right I was for it at that moment in my life,” Stowell said. “The character, as I learned about him, just felt more and more in line with something I felt inside me artistically, and was a story that I thought was really interesting about a younger version of the hero instead of the well-polished leader that you see down the road. You’re going to see a guy who’s making mistakes, you’re going to see the raw piece of metal that’s being banged into the sword that you know eventually.”

In asking about his conversations with North and Monreal, Dietzen noted that the storytelling of the prequel is different from a standard procedural. “Origins, since its inception, has been a wildly different tone than the mothership in a beautiful way,” and is more serialized, the NCIS star said.

Stowell shared that the creators had brought that up. “They said they wanted to do the True Detective version of NCIS,” he said, and that interested him. While the series didn’t end up being what was in the original script that Stowell saw — when it was going to be for streaming, not broadcast — it was his trust in North and Monreal from the beginning that led to him taking on network TV.

“It was their passion for the project and their verve for this new version of the franchise that felt like it could really catch on and be new and interesting while also serving the story of the mothership, while serving Gibbs. At the end of the day, all I’m trying to do is honor this character that Mark created, which is a gigantic responsibility because you’re talking about, even before I got the role, people’s love of this guy, you’d hear about that,” Stowell said. “The power that the character has means that I have to live up to something while also being honest to my own artistic instincts and try and do justice to this version of this guy, 30 years before. This is a very different time in his life, and so how does the instinct we see of Mark’s character grow through the experiences of his youth? That was just really interesting to me.”

NCIS: Origins, Season 3 Premiere, Tuesday, October 6, 10/9c, CBS