CBS’ long-standing police procedural franchise NCIS has been on the screens long enough to form a real bond not only between its characters, but also between its lead actors. The show features several romantically involved couples or just groups of friends that got created years after their work together, and the real-life actors aren’t an exception.
Portraying Chief Medical Examiner Jimmy Palmer ever since NCIS’ season 1, the character’s actor Brian Dietzen got attached to his already late co-star David McCallum, who in the show played Jimmy’s superior and also friend Dr. Mallard.
Commemorating his colleague that died last year, Dietzen recalled that he had the best time with McCallum on the production set and how the latter actually convinced him to do a very noble thing once.
Set to return as Jimmy Palmer in NCIS’ upcoming season 22, Dietzen passed by his former co-stars Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo’s podcast Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch where he shared a story about how McCallum had talked him into hiring a stuntman for one particular scene in season 3.
In the episode titled Switch, Jimmy is seen running down a hill when t he worst that could happen in this situation does happen and he tumbles down spraining his ankle. According to the actor, he was ready to do the dangerous trick himself when David McCallum intervened, suggesting that he should find a stuntman to do the scene.
Dietzen continued stating that “McCallum just grabbed me by the arm and was kind of serious. And he goes, ‘If you ask for a stuntman, a man who was otherwise unemployed will have a job for the day. Ask for the damn stuntman’”.
Dietzen then revealed that he’d followed his co-star’s advice and found a stuntman, but the latter eventually had no real job to do since Dietzen did the trick himself. However, he was quick to reassure everyone that the stuntman got paid for the day that he spent chilling out on NCIS’ production set.
The actor’s revelations came as yet another proof of his late colleague’s kind soul since McCallum most likely had no doubt that Dietzen would be able to do the scene with no help from a professional. However, he wanted to make sure that stuntmen were getting paid for spending most of their time on the set, even if they didn’t have a lot to do after all.