A lot of actors have appeared on NCIS over the course of its 20+-year run, and outside of the main cast, the actor who has the most appearances under his belt is Joe Spano. He debuted as Tobias Fornell in the CBS show’s first episode, “Yankee White,” and most recently appeared in “A Thousand Yards,” the NCIS franchise’s 1,000th episode that tied back to the series’ 2003 launch. In total, Spano has played Fornell in 58 episodes of the flagship show, so he’s spent a lot of time with its leading actors, including Cote de Pablo. In fact, the actress shared an emotional story about how Spano supported her before she left NCIS as a series regular.
Cote de Pablo exited NCIS two episodes into Season 11, though she would later reprise Ziva David for a surprise guest appearance in the Season 16 finale, followed by recurring in Season 17. Shortly before she took her final bow as a series regular, de Pablo had a touching moment with Joe Spano, which she talked about when the Hill Street Blues alum stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to chat with her and co-host Michael Weatherly, saying:
I have to thank you for something because you were one of the few people when I left, whatever the reasons were, they were my own personal reasons. You never cared what those reasons were. You were the only person that came up to me, and you gave me a huge hug and you said congratulations. And I will never forget that because that was so beautiful and you had no idea what I had gone through in order to make that decision. And it was a really beautiful moment and I just want to say thank you.
As you can see, the Ziva actress still isn’t willing to fully pull the curtain back on why she left NCIS back in 2013. Three years after that exit, Cote de Pablo attributed her decision to “political things and the scripts not being good enough,” but then when she came back in 2019, she said that her previous comment was “taken out of context at a certain point.” Whatever her reasoning, once she made that decision and shared it with the NCIS cast and crew, Joe Spano, who appeared as Fornell in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and “Past, Present, and Future”, simply hugged and congratulated her without inquiring about why she was leaving, which touched her. Now starting to tear up, De Pablo continued:
It was such a generous thing to do to another actor, to free them and to support them. Because ultimately that was a really tough time for me, and you were the only person that never questioned. You came came at me with such an open heart. You were not a part of the everyday family, but you came to me and you just gave me this massive hug. And the first words that came out of you were, ‘Congratulations,’ and I’ll never forget that. As a human being, the gift you gave me was so massive. I don’t think you understand what it was like to be held in that way in that moment, even if it was an instant. Because I think it was just us reading the episode before we even shot the episode, which was my last episode there, and I had no idea it was going to be my last episode.
Cote de Pablo added that she didn’t think Joe Spano was “aware” of what he’d given her, and that it was important to bring it up on the podcast since this was the first time she was seeing him since filing those episodes. Spano said that at the time, he had “a sense that that’s what you needed,” and he ended up being correct. If you’re interested in revisiting Season 11’s first two episodes, they, along with the entirety of the NCIS franchise, can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription.
Speaking of Paramount+, Cote de Pablo is currently shooting the upcoming spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva with Michael Weatherly in Budapest, and that show will exclusively stream on that platform rather than air on CBS like the past NCIS shows. It hasn’t been announced yet when Tony & Ziva will premiere, but NCIS Season 22 and the new prequel NCIS: Origins will both hit the 2024 TV schedule on Monday, October 14.
