‘NCIS: Tony & Ziva’: Michael Weatherly & Cote de Pablo on Finally Saying ‘I Love You’ (VIDEO)

Meredith Jacobs October 16, 2025, 9:00 am

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Tony & Ziva Season 1 Episode 9 “Ride or Die.”]

“The fans have waited forever and ever and ever,” Cote de Pablo acknowledges — and Michael Weatherly agrees — for some of the big moments for Tony and Ziva, and their NCIS spinoff is certainly giving them to them. In fact, in the latest NCIS: Tony & Ziva, the two finally say “I love you” to one another for the first time onscreen. (Tony did want to say it under truth serum in NCIS‘s Season 7 premiere “Truth or Consequences,” Weatherly previously shared.)

“You’re very good at the ‘I love yous,'” de Pablo remarks to Weatherly while sitting down with TV Insider in our New York Comic Con suite.

He brings up the fact that people have been wondering why Tony and Ziva weren’t together when NCIS: Tony & Ziva started. (Instead, their engagement fell apart, and they’ve been slowly coming back together.) “They were never together on camera, so we have to show all this stuff,” Weatherly explains before turning to de Pablo. “So, when we have to do a scene where maybe I’m proposing to you, or maybe the wedding that we’re at that isn’t our wedding, but we’re watching other people, or it’s our wedding day and saying, ‘I love you,’ these are huge moments.”

De Pablo agrees, knowing that fans have imagined what big moments they haven’t seen (yet) are. “Then, along with John and Michael, and certainly a bit of my romanticism, [it’s] how you craft these moments and then how you sort of sew them into the trajectory of that first season,” she says.

“We are fans of the characters, so it comes from a real connection to, we don’t want any false steps and we don’t want anything to sound fake, forced, false or anything,” Weatherly adds.

Michael Weatherly & Cote de Pablo Sizzle in Our 'NCIS: Tony & Ziva' NYCC Photos

Watch the video above for more from Weatherly and de Pablo about that big moment.

The “I love you” comes as Tony, Ziva, Claudette (Amita Suman), and Boris (Maximilian Osinski) have followed Jonah (Julien Ovendon), the Big Bad of the season who killed Tony’s best friend Henry (James D’Arcy) and is one of the people framing the couple for a whole bunch of stuff, to Spain. Jonah has manipulated his target, Graves (Sean Pertwee), to taking him to his compound there, and when he spots Tony sneaking around, he sets off an explosion. It’s when the others find Tony in the wreckage — he’s OK — that the couple (Tony first) exchange “I love yous.”

It’s also in the flashbacks in this episode to November 2021 that we see what should have been Tony and Ziva’s wedding day in Barbados. Instead, flights were grounded due to a hurricane, and their daughter Tali went missing — which Tony hid from Ziva. It was after she was found (Ziva called her “my daughter,” to which Tony pointed out she was his daughter for four years while she was gone, having faked her death) that the two sat down for a very honest conversation.

Ziva brought up the fact that he proposed (in Episode 4’s flashbacks) because she was upset when she thought she was the cause for Tali’s nightmares. It wasn’t planned, but he meant it, Tony insisted. As Ziva saw it, he was trying to fix things, fix her, but she wasn’t broken and while she was in therapy, he couldn’t do the work for her. When he asked why she said yes, Ziva admitted that because he and Tali were all she had, she couldn’t lose them. When he brought up how hard it was on Tali that she was gone for so long, she apologized for leaving him and not telling him about Tali’s birth, which she called the biggest mistake of her life. Then it was Tony’s turn for a confession: Sometimes, he thought he didn’t trust her. Neither wanted a marriage without trust.

What did you think of Tony and Ziva’s first onscreen “I love you”s? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS: Tony & Ziva, Season 1 Finale, Thursday, October 23, Paramount+