EARLY in his NCIS career, Michael Weatherly detoured from his script but neglected to tell the writers, cast or crew of his plan.He put his own words into the mouth of NCIS special agent Tony DiNozzo and startled cast members sharing his scene.

“Normally when you want to change a line or use a new prop or even pick up a pen, you have to talk to a lot of people about it,” Weatherly says.

“I just started doing it. I wanted to break out of this rut I found myself in by trying to be a little less stiff.
“I gave myself permission to not ask permission of the people around me.”The move resulted in what has become a regular slap to the head for DiNozzo’s cheekiness by his castmates in the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) office, including his boss, Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon).

“That’s where the head slap came from. Mark became frustrated with me one day on set and I got a slap on the back of the head. That didn’t stop me, I made a deliberate choice not to be a good boy.

“I didn’t want to make the day longer for everyone, I just wanted to make it a lot more interesting.

“And life is more interesting now that I have stopped worrying about what everyone else thinks.”

NCIS is in its fourth season and Weatherly says the show’s writers are more accustomed to his unpredictable scenes.

They allowed his character to have a shot at leading the team and they deepened his personal life with love.

“It’s a challenge to read that your character’s eyes well up with tears and slide down his face as he says, ‘I love you’.”

Weatherly’s ability to portray deep emotion — on and off camera — is renowned.

Weatherly was shaken by the end of his romance to screen siren Jessica Alba. More recently, he endured grief over the tragedy his niece, actor Alexandra Breckenridge, suffered when her boyfriend died in December from heart complications.

“I put myself in Tony’s circumstances and in my own personal life there has been a lot of stuff going on this year, so crying was not as hard as I thought it would be,” Weatherly says.

With Harmon, David McCallum and Pauley Perrette, Weatherly makes up the quartet who started with the show four years ago.

The quirky action drama, filmed in Los Angeles, has the NCIS team cracking jokes while cracking cases of crimes linked to the US Navy-Marine Corps.

Weatherly, 38, divorced and single, lives in Hollywood near his son, August, 11.

His former wife, Amelie Heinle, plays Victoria Newman in the soap The Young and the Restless.

They met on the set of the soap Loving and Weatherly met his former fiancee Alba in the action/sci-fi series Dark Angel.

Dropping out of college to pursue acting did not win the approval of his father, millionaire businessman Michael Weatherly Sr.

“He was not pleased. He wouldn’t pay for me in drama school or my rent while I was trying to find work,” Weatherly says.

“But he has always supported me as a father. He instilled in me, my brother and our sisters a certain work ethic. We were on our own and I am grateful for that.”

Weatherly has 11 siblings after the third marriages of both of his parents.

Discussing his family is like relating a soap-opera plot, he says.

“I have many steps and halves. It reaches a point of saturation and the brain can tolerate only so much.”

WEATHERLY CATCHES DiNOZZO WITH HIS PANTS DOWN

HIS pants, or lack of them, played a key role in Michael Weatherly becoming Tony DiNozzo in NCIS.

DiNozzo is No.2 to the stern, buttoned-up Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and Weatherly says getting the two characters’ dynamics just right proved vital in winning his role.

“I had a choice. I could either play all my dialogue like Denzel Washington to Gene Hackman in the submarine movie Crimson Tide, who were fighting for control with all that testosterone. Or I could let him be the alpha male and I could run around like the little chihuahua and every once in a while he slaps me,” Weatherly says.

“When I met Mark, I could tell he had specific ideas about things, so when we did our first scene together I didn’t wear any underwear. I was wearing a suit, but I was what they call . . . freeballing.

“As I was going through the scene I would stand a little differently. If it’s hot out you don’t walk as fast as anyone else because you know you can chafe.”

Weatherly says, unconvincingly, that he is vastly different from DiNozzo, who he says fancies himself as a womaniser.

“We are both heterosexual men who both enjoy the company of women — as many women as possible — not necessarily simultaneously but not excluding that as an option,” he says.

Source: Herald Sun