‘NCIS’ & ‘Origins’ Stars Wilmer Valderrama and Austin Stowell Preview Crossover and New Seasons

Tuesday nights on CBS are once again NCIS‘s this fall. NCIS moves back to its 8/7c slot, followed by the prequel Origins at 9/8c and the international hit Sydney at 10/9c. And to celebrate the night — and the upcoming NCIS and NCIS: Origins crossover, airing November 11 — TV Insider spoke with the mothership’s Wilmer Valderrama and the prequel’s Austin Stowell about what’s coming up on their two shows.

Both have major cliffhangers to resolve when they return on October 14. NCIS ended with team leader Parker (Gary Cole) finding his father murdered in his home; he knows it was long-time nemesis Carla (Rebecca De Mornay). Meanwhile, NCIS: Origins left us with the fate of Gibbs’ potential love interest Lala (Mariel Molino) up in the air after a horrific car crash.

Below, Wilmer Valderrama and Austin Stowell preview what’s to come on NCIS and NCIS: Origins, the upcoming crossover, young Ducky (Adam Campbell) coming to the prequel, both their love lives (including with Kathleen Kenny‘s Diane for Gibbs), and more.

Austin, what can you say about Lala’s fate and what we’ll be seeing as it’s revealed and how Gibbs is going to be handling it, whatever it is?

Austin Stowell: It would be such a disservice to the show if we to have that be Lala’s true ending, if we never saw her again. She will be back in some capacity. After an accident like that, obviously things change and the ripple effect of the finale will be felt by all of the characters on the show. And it is dealt with in a very real way that you wouldn’t just — certainly if you were able to, you wouldn’t just jump right back into work. And if you weren’t able to, what would you be doing? How are you going to fill that void in your life? But NCIS is a show that we’ve already seen that we don’t necessarily deal with things in a steady timeline. There might be flashbacks, so she’s back, but you’ll have to see exactly how.

How is Gibbs handling it though? Because we know what she means to him.

How does Gibbs handle any tragedy in his life? He’s shooting first and asking questions later. He is doing what he thinks is right and is the most noble and righteous thing in the moment, but that just because he thinks it’s right doesn’t make it right. And this version that we see when he is younger is still, emotions are raw to him. He’s just a year out from losing his wife and child and the therapy obviously did not work last season. And we’ve seen where his decisions lead him. And it always seems that no matter what he does, tragedy finds him. And so we’re going to see his realization of that and his realization of his true feelings for Lala. And if he does have such strong feelings about her, what’s the safest move?

Wilmer, Torres certainly knows a little about going rogue, which is what we’re going to see from Parker after the last season’s finale cliffhanger. Steven D. Binder told me that the team is told to stand down, but we know they’ll have Parker’s back. Is Torres 100% in on helping Parker no matter what, or does he think he needs to take a step back at any point?

Wilmer Valderrama: It’s almost his idea. He’s just like, “Well, OK, just say when. What car are we taking?” I mean, that’s literally Torres’s first answer. And I’ll tell you what: I was very concerned with that season finale because I did not want to be let down in my season premiere. I wanted to read a script that took the audience exactly where the audience would’ve wanted us to go. They want us to go the distance. That’s what we do. They want us to get in real, long-lasting trouble. Yes, we’re going to break a lot of stuff, but I’m going to tell you that in true NCIS fashion, we create real, long-lasting plots, right? These two episodes are going to kick off a theme for the season, and we want to cook with the big tools. We’ve changed a lot of things on the show. We’ve updated a lot of things on the show. And going into the season, now that we are returning back to the Tuesday nights at 8 o’clock, we’re like, well, coming back home requires a very explosive, and like Steven Binder said, a very lighted on fire type of season.

And what’s different this year is that we are going to know what our season finale is going to be really, really early. We’re working on the season finale now, and we are going to make sure that our characters, to meet the season finale, go through their personal journeys to get them psychologically and physically to where they need to be for this finale. So expect some really important to follow character arcs, a lot of nostalgia because we’re back on our Tuesday nights. So anybody who experienced that Tuesday night may or may not be making very strategic appearances to continue to push the show to where it needs to be. There is existing characters, there is old school characters. There’s legacy characters all coming in to celebrate the Tuesday night return. And these are not going to be just fun cameos. They’re going to be strategic chess moves on where we’re going with the season.

So, we’re building something that I feel procedural shows tend to not have the luxury of having, and because we have the luxury of understanding we’re going to go, it’s given us so much more of resources to play with. And that which leads us into what is our relationship with our lineup — 8 o’clock NCIS, 9 o’clock NCIS: Origins, 10 o’clock NCIS: Sydney — how are we all going to behave together when we want the fans to stick it with us for three shows? So we’re finding really, really exciting, clever ways in which television had kind of flirted with, but we’re deepening the roots of how these shows can coexist in the same universe. These are going to be Avengers. In other words, we’re going back to like, “S**t, I got to watch it tonight because I don’t want anybody else to ruin it for me.” And we’re going back to that TV era of just saying there’s a sense of urgency and why I need to see what happens with these characters.

Our season is going to bring these two shows together again in an interesting way. And we have a major crossover with NCIS: Origins that I think is not only clever, but brilliant in how it deepens how we communicate and how we coexist on the same screen together, which people think like, oh, well, I’m sure it’s a cold case that starts there and it gets solved there. And it’s actually beyond that and it’s super clever. It’s really fun. [to Stowell] But you can talk a little bit more about the crossover, too, but I will tell you, it’s just awesome. It’s really, really great.

Stowell: Yeah, it’s great. You’re going to see characters that — this is what I love so much about this show is how everything is just logical all the time, that our writers fight tooth and nail to make this as logical as possible. That yes, this is very real. This is how it would go. And so for a case like this that — you’re going to see a case is reopened, and it’s because there is opportunities to do so, which means that you can talk to the witnesses again. You can talk to the perpetrator or the supposed perpetrator. You’re going to see evidence boxes reopened. You’re going to see interrogation tapes. And so it is allowing our two universes to talk to one another without having to have Mark Harmon or I appear as a ghost and have a little chat with Torres. And it’s really smart and it’s heartbreaking. You’re going to have to break out the tissues for this one because it is, it’s heartbreaking, that when you read the news about stories every now and again like this, you can’t imagine what it would be like. And that’s the beauty of storytelling is that we’re the ones who bring it to life, that you get to see what you couldn’t imagine. The audience experience is going to be a wild ride on this one that it’s going to be stormy at times and going to be fearful, and it’s going to be heartbreaking. But the NCISes also has this wonderful formula of giving you something every week that allows you to feel fulfilled, allows you to feel some sort of completion, that life moves in these cyclical ways. And that what things come around

I was going to ask, with this crossover, it’s hard to imagine your characters interacting. I can also see Torres reading a report and then seeing your version of Gibbs saying what he’s reading. So we’re not going to get anything like that?

Stowell: It’s a good guess. That ain’t it. [Both laugh] But it is something like that, that we are speaking to each other through how our characters approach the job, if that makes sense. And it doesn’t right now. So you’re just going to have to watch.

Wilmer, Steven told me that Torres is going to be dipping his toe back into dating in a way that will cause problems for everyone.

[Both laugh]

Valderrama: That’s such a good way to put it. It’s messy and it’s complicated and it’s not what he wants. Is it what he needs though? I don’t know. But I can only tell you that —

Stowell: Sometimes we have to teach ourselves what we don’t need in order to understand what we do need.

Valderrama: —what we do need. And that’s very, I mean — I’ll follow that sentiment and say that you touched on something that’s really interesting because it’s not Torres has been heartbroken by relationships before. It’s that he used to be such a lone wolf and then embraced himself in a family like what NCIS was, see himself in it with a role, and then have the departure of multiple people of major influence in his life. And I think you know what I’m talking about. So all these things really play a factor on his cynicism when it comes to dating. And he tried it very quickly with Knight’s sister, and that was also very messy. Well, there’s a messier version of this that really makes it very muddy for the rest. But I don’t know how far we’re going to go yet. We haven’t shot those episodes yet, but I know that they’re planning something very interesting. And man, I have three things that I could drop right now, and I’d in so much trouble. But I will tell you that we’re cooking with the natural resources the fans expect to come into his life again.

… Honestly, I can tell you that we’re going to try to lighten up Torres a little bit. He’s still going to be the same grumpy smartass, but I think it’s fun to see him have certain colors.

Austin, we’re going to see your Gibbs with Adam Campbell’s Ducky in the episode paying tribute to David McCallum. We know that they’ve met each other before that because we had that episode of NCIS. So, what’s their dynamic like this time? Because it’s continuing to show the origins of that very important relationship to the franchise.

Stowell: Ducky is undeniably charming, able to win over the grumpiest of grumps, maybe even Torres.

Torres: Maybe.

Stowell: When I first got this job and I started binging all the episodes, I couldn’t help but fall in love with David McCallum’s version of the character. It felt cozy and comfortable that whenever his scenes came up, I found myself stopping — I would be folding laundry and I would just have it on a lot, and I would stop and watch. I couldn’t help it. There was just something so alluring about him. And Adam, it is so easy to see why he was cast, that he’s an incredible actor and he has that same magic. He has that same — and I almost want to call it like a Disney style comfort, that Pixar level comfort. There’s a reason that we all love those movies, and there’s a reason why we all love Ducky, and there’s a reason that Gibbs is so connected to him and why their bond is so strong.

He’s somebody that, I think it’s easier for him in this circumstance to talk with somebody outside the office. This is before they were coworkers. He’s able to share parts of himself that he guards with other people. It’s really special. Fans won’t have to wait very long.

And there’s going to be more characters popping up. There’s going to be more connections between our version of the show and the mothership. It only makes sense that these shows are more connected than they have been. We had to do our due diligence in the first season that there was a story at this point in Gibbs’ life that we had to tell. It is so informative of who he is as a man and as a special agent that we had to tell that part of his story. But now we’re seeing him grow. We’re seeing his relationship with Diane [grow] into romance and into what we know will become a marriage eventually.

And we’re getting to see the opportunities for more communication between our universes arise, and that’s really fun to watch, that it almost could be — it’s like two shows could become one, and it’s just different. I mean, you see that all the time where things jump back and forth in a timeline, and the storytelling and the creativeness of our writing staff is really wonderful. It’s not just, “OK, we’re going to reopen this case, that we’ve got new evidence and we have new technology.” That’d be the easy way out and we do anything but that. It is really interesting, and audiences, I think, are just going to love our ability to tell stories together.

NCIS, Season 23 Premiere, Tuesday, October 14, 8/7c, CBS

NCIS: Origins, Season 2 Premiere, Tuesday, October 14, 9/8c, CBS