Mark Harmon Spills the Tea on NCIS Recasting Gibbs with Another Actor – His True Feelings Revealed!

Who Plays Young Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS: Origins?

As NCIS returns this fall, it brings with it a new prequel series, NCIS: Origins, set in 1991 and centered on a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Austin Stowell has been cast to portray the younger version of the iconic character, making him the third actor to take on the role after Mark Harmon and Harmon’s son, Sean, who played young Gibbs in the original NCIS series.

Mark Harmon, who embodied Gibbs for 19 seasons and now serves as the narrator and executive producer of the prequel, shared his thoughts on what he was looking for in an actor to fill these significant shoes. During the Television Critics Association press tour in July, he told Parade that finding the right actor was about more than just physical resemblance. “I always thought there was a calm that was important,” Harmon explained. “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.”

Co-showrunner Gina Lucita Monreal also saw something special in Stowell. “He walked out of the room, and she said, ‘That guy is a star,’” Harmon recounted. “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.” Monreal added that Stowell captured the essence of Gibbs, describing the character as “a broken character but also with immense strength.” She felt that Stowell successfully balanced these complex traits.

NCIS: Origins is the brainchild of Sean Harmon, who, at the TCA Tour in July, expressed his honor in stepping into the role his father made famous. However, Sean Harmon noted that he never intended to make a career out of playing Gibbs. Instead, he was interested in exploring the character’s early struggles and choices, focusing on “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 delve into these aspects of Gibbs’ character when it premieres this fall on CBS.