What To Know
- James Garner nearly played a significant role on NCIS.
- Executive producer Charles Floyd Johnson explained what happened on the NCIS: Partners & Probies podcast.
The Gibbs family almost looked a bit different onscreen on NCIS. In Season 6’s “Heartland,” we met Jackson, Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ (Mark Harmon) father, and he was played by Ralph Waite. However, as executive producer Charles Floyd Johnson revealed on the latest episode of the NCIS: Partners & Probies podcast, hosted by Brian Dietzen (Dr. Jimmy Palmer) and Diona Reasonover (Kasie Hines), someone else was supposed to play that part.
It was during the Probie (fan) questions part of the podcast that Dietzen asked if there was any character, from the NCIS universe or JAG, that Johnson would bring back to the show. While the producer at first couldn’t name one (“There are so many, it’s like, how do you pick your children?”), he did share one that we never saw.
“I’ll tell you one that I wish we could, and he never made it to the screen,” Johnson said. “When we were trying to find Mark Harmon’s dad on NCIS, we decided that we were going to go after James Garner.”
Since Johnson had worked with Garner, he was part of that process.
“We got him to do it. He didn’t really want to do it at first,” the EP admitted. “And he did do it… He liked the script, and he came to the read-through, and he went to wardrobe, and we had this great day with him. Then he went home, and that night, he had a stroke, and he never ever did the role. And it’s just one of those missed things. We were all very sad.” Garner had a stroke in 2008 and died in 2014, at the age of 86.
Johnson shared that then Susan Bluestein or someone else in casting came up with Ralph Waite to play Jackson. He “was perfect,” he said, “and the public never knew that he was not it, that Garner was the original guy. They kind of looked alike. They both had that gray hair … If I could have made that work, but that was not in the cards. That stood out to me.”
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Dietzen recalled David McCallum, who starred as Ducky, walking up to Garner during the table read. “They had not spent a ton of time together since filming The Great Escape [in 1963]. It was pretty incredible to see these two legends together,” he noted.
Johnson added, “And of course, they were very young then when they did that movie. Great cast, that movie.”
NCIS, Season 24 Premiere, Tuesday, October 6, 8/7c, CBS