Rocky Carroll has been on NCIS for so long, one wouldn’t be faulted for forgetting he hasn’t been there since the beginning. But with NCIS Season 22 just days away from premiering on the 2024 TV schedule, it’s worth looking back at a time when Carroll’s character, Leon Vance, was the new guy. Vance was introduced in the final chunk of Season 5 as Assistant Director of NCIS, and by the end of the season, he took over as Director following the death of Lauren Holly’s Jenny Shepard. It turns out that while shooting the final Season 5 scene, Carroll was the target of a prank orchestrated by Leroy Jethro Gibbs actor Mark Harmon which, quite frankly, is kind of hilarious.
Rocky Carroll recently stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to talk with hosts Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, who acted alongside him on NCIS for many years and will soon be leading their own spinoff, NCIS: Tony & Ziva. The Vance actor laid out how in the final moments of the Season 5 finale, his character broke up the show’s main team in his new office by handing them their “sentence,” as he put it. He also noted how Vance “had this habit of chewing a toothpick,” which was directly taken from NCIS technical director Leon Carroll, Jr., whom Leon Vance was named after. That toothpick habit was the basis for the prank Harmon arranged, with Rocky Carroll first saying:
In this seminal moment, that was a very heavy, very serious moment where all the agents at NCIS were learning their fate, Harmon had instructed each one of you to conceal a toothpick in your mouth. So now the cameras are over the backs of all the other cast members, and it's my coverage, so the cameras are directly on me. So I'm looking into the eyes of of each of you… I’m giving it my best, I’m trying to lay it on thick. I'm giving it the best blue steel as I can with each one [of you] 'cause I know the cameras on me. This is my moment. It’s tight coverage. This is it, baby. And then suddenly out of nowhere, like, each of the actors standing there suddenly flicks a toothpick out of their mouths to do that they've been concealing for the entire time, led by Mark Harmon. And Mark Harmon had prefaced this prank by saying, and I think people were a little hesitant because, ‘Guy’s new to the show, let's not get him too ruffled.’ [Harmon] says, ‘Don't worry, he's not going to break.’
Although the NCIS Season 5 finale, titled “Judgement Day (Part II),” marked Rocky Carroll’s fifth appearance on the show, he was still a newbie among the group. So when the time came to shoot the scene where he sent Ziva back to Israel, reassigned Tony and McGee, and assigned new team members for Gibbs to oversee, Mark Harmon decided to have a little fun by having him, Michael Weatherly, Cote de Pablo and Sean Murray stick those toothpicks in their mouth. Well, actually, it functioned partly as an amusing prank, but also as a way for Harmon to prove he was confident that Carroll was a skilled enough actor to not break character at that ridiculous sight, and the was right. Carroll continued:
It was basically kind of a bet that we're going to do this right on his coverage. He's the only one who's going to see it. It's the equivalent of dropping in your pants almost when somebody is on their coverage. I'm proud to say that he was right. So by the time I get to the end of whatever that speech is where I'm where I banished you all to the wilderness, there's an entire row of actors standing there with toothpicks in their mouth that only I can see. And there's just this moment where for an interminably long period of time, nobody's yelling cut because they're waiting to see if I'm just going to fucking drop, right? So finally we cut. I didn't break, but by the time when the camera stopped rolling, we all, we all had a very big laugh about it. But I think Harmon's thing was, ‘I told you he wasn't going to break. He was not going to break!’
Kudos to Rocky Carroll for keeping it together that long! Of course, those who’ve been watching NCIS for a long time, or have caught up on the series using their Paramount+ subscription, know that when Season 6 rolled around, it didn’t take long for the main characters to get back together. It took a little longer for Leon Vance to not be viewed so suspiciously, but that time eventually came, and now it’s hard to picture NCIS without him. Even better, he still gets the occasional episode focused on him every now and then, like when he was targeted in the NCIS franchise’s 1,000th episode earlier this year.
NCIS Season 22 premieres Monday, October 14th at 8 pm ET, and the extra-sized premiere of the Gibbs-focused prequel NCIS: Origins will follow immediately afterwards. In addition to the aforementioned NCIS: Tony & Ziva premiering sometime next year (probably), NCIS: Sydney Season 2 is also on the way.