All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Soaps.com may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Playing a character for almost two decades, there’s a certain attachment to that character. So, it makes sense that Mark Harmon feels a sense of ownership of Leroy Jethro Gibbs. He embodied the man for 19 seasons of NCIS. Now, another actor is stepping into those shoes in the prequel, NCIS: Origins. But who plays young Gibbs and how does Harmon really feel about the recast?
Who Plays Young Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS Origins?
When CBS shows returns in the fall, the NCIS mothership will have some new company – an NCIS prequel set in 1991 titled NCIS: Origins that’s set to follow a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Playing young Gibbs is Austin Stowell. He is only the third actor to play the character, after Mark Harmon and his son Sean, who stepped into the role originated by his dad on the original NCIS when young Gibbs was needed.
AdvertisementXem bài viết này trên Instagram
During the Television Critics Association press tour in July Harmon spoke to Parade about what exactly he, who serves as both narrator and executive producer on the prequel, was looking for in an actor who could step into the shoes of Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
“I always thought there was a calm that was important,” Harmon said. “It’s a lot for an actor to come into a room with that kind of a burden of a load to try to say, ‘Can I physically look like that person? Can I be that person?’ I thought Austin just was himself.”
Harmon wasn’t the only one who saw something special in Stowell, co-showrunner Gina Lucita Monreal saw it right away too.
“He walked out of the room, and she said, ‘That guy is a star.’” Harmon told Parade. “That’s what she said. The truth of it is he lit the room. You’re in a room for a long time with people coming in one after another and you just go with an instinct. That’s what we’ve done.”
For Monreal, there were the seeds of the character in the actor from the beginning. “What I was excited about was the fact that he had the core of what I think Gibbs is, which is this broken character but also this immense strength. I feel like that’s really a difficult balance to achieve, and I think Austin does that.”
NCIS: Origins was the brainchild of Sean Harmon, who at the TCA Tour in July called it an “absolute honor to have stepped into the role and essentially to play a character my dad created over so many years.” Harmon, however, “never really figured I wanted to make a career out of [playing Gibbs].” Instead, he was interested in telling a story about “a guy who’s got something broken inside, a guy who at one point in his life is very much at risk of going down a much darker path. And what about this job made that choice different?”
The show is set to explore just that, starting this fall on CBS.