Michael Weatherly Was Sick of the Roles He Was Offered Before ‘NCIS’

NCIS wasn’t Michael Weatherly’s first network show . He’d built his film resume up slowly prior to the procedural with diverse but unsteady television work. But NCIS didn’t just give him the job stability he was looking for.

It gave him a chance to play the type of character he always wanted to. Tony DiNozzo was the type of character Michael Weatherly always wanted to play It took a while before Weatherly found a character that he could relate to. When he got into acting, he cited actors such as Cary Grant and Tom Hanks as direct inspirations.

“I saw every Tom Hanks movie on opening day — which is how I came to J oe Versus the Volcano . That was the catalyst [to become an actor]. My girlfriend Betsy thought I was a lunatic to move to New York.

And clearly Betsy was on the money,” Weatherly once told TV Guide . But when he started acting professionally, Weatherly wasn’t getting the kind of roles that his idols had. After doing guest roles in a couple of television projects, Weatherly noticed a pattern between his characters that he wasn’t a fan of.

“I started out doing soaps and by the time I got to Dark Angel and some other jobs, I was kind of in a box, having played this Randy Blandy-type character for years,” Weatherly once said in an interview with Venice Mag . “Kind of like a department store mannequin that talks. When I first became excited about acting, Tom Hanks and Cary Grant really appealed to me, but when I started acting, none of those kinds.