NCIS Star Mark Harmon Had One Rule About Sick Days On The CBS Series

As glamorous as working in Hollywood often sounds, it sometimes seems like it would actually be a nightmare. If you get really famous, paparazzi and fans follow you around and critique your every move. If you don't get famous, you spend years trying to earn enough roles to keep your SAG card without doing work that's demeaning or stereotyping. The easiest level of fame seems to be working on network TV, where the paychecks improve over time, your shows sometimes last for over a decade, and people know you but don't put you on tabloid covers every week. But even that career track can be a minefield: network shows can shoot dangerously long hours, and even the most standardized Hollywood sets have intense, messy power structures that can allow for some loaded interactions that wouldn't fly at, say, an office job.

Even the most popular shows in the country deal with these problems: in a semi-recent episode of the podcast "Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch" (via Looper), former "NCIS" star Cote de Pablo described an interaction with original series lead Mark Harmon that doesn't exactly scream "comfortable workplace." According to de Pablo, who played former Mossad agent Ziva on the long-running CBS series for 194 episodes, she once took a day off work on doctors' orders when she had a high temperature. "I thought, 'Well, if the doctor's telling me that I can't go to work, I must follow orders.'" But the decision, which would be a no-brainer in the post-COVID age, was met with pushback from Harmon according to her retelling.

"I made the grave mistake of staying home, and I was sent a car, and I went to set, and Mark came up to me, and — he was kind enough, but he was very stern, and he said, 'You come to set, we decide when you're sick,'" de Pablo paraphrased. "It was like, 'You come to set, and then we will determine how we address this.'" 

The actress says the lesson learned from the exchange was "don't take a sick day," but in retrospect, the situation sounds pretty skewed. Harmon wasn't added as a producer on the series until season 6, but this incident reportedly happened in season 3, which means he would have been telling his coworker he had final say on whether or not she was ill enough to miss work when he wasn't her boss. According to the story, he asked her to come in to work with a fever, which could have been both a contagion risk and dangerous for her health.

De Pablo says "mentally," the situation "just did a trick on [her]," but she also says she never got sick again — or at least, never stayed home — after the conversation. From an outside perspective, Harmon doesn't come across well here at all (other co-stars including Michael Weatherly and Pauley Perrette have reported negative experiences with him as well), but the situation apparently helped de Pablo realize that absent cast members can hold up an entire production. "When you think about it, you know, anyone in production can do a job, better, worse, whatever," she said in the podcast. "But no one can play McGee, no one can play DiNozzo ... So you really had to be there, and that's a lot of pressure." 

Apparently, the appeal of returning to the world of "NCIS" outweighs any lingering feelings of pressure de Cote might have: she'll be reprising her role as Ziva in an upcoming spinoff series titled "NCIS: Tony & Ziva," which will reunite her with Weatherly. There's no word yet on whether Harmon will be involved — or whether he's relaxed his sick day policy in the past two decades.