NCIS creator Don Bellisario nearly passed over Mark Harmon for the role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the gruff former Marine sniper who anchored the CBS procedural for 18 seasons.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s Gibbs. He had matured. He’s good-looking in a totally different way than he was as a young guy,'” Bellisario recalled, describing the moment everything changed, per TVLine.
That epiphany didn’t come from an audition room. It came from a tape of Harmon’s four-episode run on THE WEST WING in 2002, where he played a Secret Service agent, and it turned a casting long shot into the actor’s defining role.
Movieguide® has followed the NCIS franchise closely over the years, most recently reporting on Harmon’s return to the franchise as narrator and executive producer of the prequel series NCIS: ORIGINS. Casting director Susan Bluestein said that Bellisario “hadn’t seen a lot of Mark’s work” before the search began in earnest.
Before Harmon’s name settled the matter, Bellisario’s wish list read like a different show entirely. Scott Glenn was his top choice, and Harrison Ford was floated as a dream casting he never seriously expected to land.
Related: Mark Harmon Is Back for Good in NCIS: ORIGINS
Charlie Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Clive Owen, Val Kilmer, Patrick Swayze and Kevin Bacon all came up during development, per TVLine, before Bellisario landed on Harmon ahead of the show’s 2003 premiere.
NCIS went on to become one of network television’s most durable hits, and Gibbs became the moral center of a franchise that has since spun off multiple series. For an audience that has spent two decades inviting this character into their living rooms, learning how close he came to being played by someone else is the kind of behind-the-scenes detail that reshapes how you watch the reruns.
The partnership between creator and star didn’t end as smoothly as it began. Bellisario departed NCIS after Season 4, with reports at the time pointing to friction over his hands-on management style and Harmon’s growing frustration with it.
Harmon himself walked away from the series early in Season 19 in 2021, closing out a run that made Gibbs one of the most recognizable characters on television. He hasn’t disappeared from the world he helped build, though.
Movieguide® previously reported that Harmon returned to the franchise for NCIS: ORIGINS, the 1991-set prequel starring Austin Stowell as a young Gibbs under the wing of mentor Mike Franks. Harmon appears on screen as the older Gibbs narrating his own origin story and serves as an executive producer alongside his son, Sean Harmon.
Bellisario’s reservations about Harmon are easy to forget now that Gibbs and the actor who played him are practically synonymous. It’s a reminder that even the most iconic roles often start as someone’s second, third or ninth choice, and that the right performance can retroactively make every other option look like the wrong one.
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