Sex symbol reveals all
Helen Barlow
August 02, 2006 12:00am
WHEN Michael Weatherly, best known as the cute Logan/Eyes Only from the teen sci-fi series, Dark Angel, went to play Tony DiNozzo in NCIS, nobody would have guessed the secret to his success.
Yet the outgoing 38-year-old actor who plays a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed naval investigator is the first to tell you: it's that he doesn't wear underwear.
In NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigation Service), DiNozzo is No.2 to the stern buttoned-up Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, and as Weatherly explains in his boyish yappy way, getting the two characters' dynamics just right proved vitally important.
"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," he says.
"When I first met Mark, I could tell how he had very 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," he pauses for effect, "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.
"So I liked this no-underwear idea. It's just one example of letting a character be whoever he is. There would be no artifice and no pretence.
"I liked the idea of a guy who's very straightforward. DiNozzo's not deep. He just flits along the surface of things."
Apart from being a white-hot cocky investigator, who constantly rubs it in when he is right, DiNozzo is a rabid womaniser and as such bears the brunt of many of the jokes from his less flighty NCIS co-stars (who are an interesting bunch and elevate the series from the dross).
In fact when Weatherly notes how DiNozzo is like the child of Magnum PI he is not joking, because NCIS creator Donald Bellisario had also been behind that series, as well as JAG, where the military investigators and lawyers were more formally dressed in uniforms (and, one imagines, underwear). Weatherly had briefly been on the latter series, as well, as Special Agent Tony DiNozzo.
"I met Don again when I was playing Robert Wagner in The Mystery of Natalie Wood, which was actually shooting in Sydney," he recalls, "and I was having a good time, filming on a sail boat at Avalon. We had lunch in a harbour restaurant and Don talked about this idea for a show about navy cops who not only investigate crimes but also deal with terrorism and espionage, so it was a much wider palette than JAG. Then we started talking about Magnum PI, which is one of my favourite shows, and somehow the new character was born there.
"So Tony, who was originally a bland character, a gritty street homicide cop from Baltimore whose instincts got him through some tough scrapes, morphed a bit. As we went about doing the show Gibbs became like a centre pole to our little circus tent and we put on our little show around him."
While Pauley Perette's goth/computer geek Abby has developed a cult following, Weatherly has emerged as the series sex symbol. He has been voted one of television's most eligible bachelors, though he has not always been single.
Briefly engaged, lol. ;D
They were together for three and half years, that´s a long time especially in Hollywood when celebs can and do so quickly marry and divorce. In rereading this interview, it looks and sounds like the writer simply cut and pasted parts of older MW interviews together.
He once joked that looking up from Logan's wheelchair provided "the best view in North America". He was also in a short-lived marriage to actress Amelia Heinle, whom he met on the soaps, Loving and The City. They have a son, August, now 10, and are on amicable terms.
Weatherly puts forth a fairly unconvincing case 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. I think that in some ways Tony's a lot better with women than I am," he says with a nervous laugh, "because he's very direct and confident and he can let it slide off his back. I'm a little more insecure about things like that. Of course you can call me a bull---- artist, but I think that's probably a much better answer if I'm going to have any chance of getting that girl's attention over there."
Certainly when it comes to Weatherly, chivalry is not dead at the Monte Carlo Television Festival, where the perennially playful actor has just bowed down and kissed the feet of Tichina Arnold, who plays Chris Rock's mum in Everybody Hates Chris. It is her birthday, after all.
Perhaps though, all the comic bluster is a front for Weatherly's demons.
While he admits that DiNozzo comes from a wealthy background (like the WASPY freedom-fighting Logan/Eyes Only before him) he fails to mention that he, too, was the child of a multimillionaire, the American importer of the Swiss army knife. That's probably because Weatherly, who has six siblings, was disinherited by his father when he chose to pursue acting as a career. He has had a lot to prove.
Even if we really hadn't noticed him in his previous incarnations, Weatherly has appeared in some prominent television shows and movies over the years.
While playing in a band (music is his other passion), he landed his first job as Theo Huxtable's roommate on The Cosby Show, and was a series regular on the short-lived television series Significant Others, opposite a pre-Alias Jennifer Garner. He then appeared in two prominent independent movies: opposite a then unknown Rosario Dawson in Trigger Happy and Chloe Sevigny in The Last Days of Disco.
Here´s the link,
www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,19982321-5003422,00.html
Thanks to
lakelover for the info.