After almost six years without Michael Weatherly's charming goofball Tony DiNozzo on screens, he is back, with the long-anticipated premiere of Tony & Ziva. A sequel, of sorts, to CBS's long-running series NCIS, it follows Tony and former partner Ziva David (Cote de Pablo) as they live their lives raising their teen daughter in Paris, France. Of course, things are never that easy for former agents on TV, and the two quickly find themselves being chased across Europe as they stand accused of bribing Interpol out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
When NCIS first debuted in 2003, the character of Tony received a mixed reaction, largely due to the perceived male chauvinism he exhibited and his larger-than-life personality. "Tony is sort of a magnification of a facet of my real-life personality," Michael tells HELLO! over Zoom, a few weeks before his return to TV.
Speaking from his home in Connecticut, the 57-year-old actor is also a bold and perhaps divisive personality, taking over our conversation, winding through segues before returning to the original question. By 2020, after 30+ years in the industry and an accusation of sexual harassment that was settled by CBS for $9.5 million, Michael says he was burned out and over the industry.
What happened in the last few years for Michael to be ready to return to the world of NCIS and procedural TV? "My wife and I have this conversation all the time. It's very difficult to take time and look at yourself. You have to go through the bottom of yourself, and I was able to get there – I did a lot of therapy, a lot of reckoning and examination of different things," he says.
"I took a few years off because I had burned myself into a bit of a puddle. I was directing and acting, I did 125 episodes of Bull, I started seeing the writing on the wall, and I said, 'This is exhausting.' I wasn't connecting with the character in a way that felt like I was in flow, so I took time off."
Michael's sister died during those years when he "was so busy making television that I didn't find out for three days"; his brother passed away in 2023, and his father died in 2024 during the making of Tony & Ziva. "It's very interesting how many people moved on to the next plane over the last few years, and that brought an urgency back into my world," says Michael.
Michael spent time in the music studio recording "ethereal and spacey and fun" tracks for himself, and he reunited with Cote for their 25-episode Spotify podcast looking back at NCIS. But the biggest change was reconnecting with his children; Michael is father to eldest son August, from his first marriage to Amelia Heinle, and teen daughter Olivia and son Liam with wife Bojana.
"One of the things that makes me happiest is how close I am with my kids now," he says. "I see how much my daughter loves dancing, and my son loves playing soccer. They will spend hours a day putting themselves through the meat grinder of rehearsal and training, but I love that they do it with a smile and with gratitude. They're in flow, and it's a really beautiful place to get to in life."
During production on the podcast with Cote, the pair arrived "organically" at the concept for Tony & Ziva, which premieres September 4, 2025, on Paramount+. The series also became a place where Michael could find his own flow, something he had been missing for years.
"When I was at a certain point in my career, I would say, 'If it feels wrong, then it must be right, because everything feels wrong.' I took a lot of time and examined those words closely, and now, if it feels wrong, I say, 'Let's talk about it,'" he says. "I care a lot less about what people think about me. But in a great way – I want to be understood."
"At that period in my life, I was going through a particularly earnest streak, and I was fighting against what I thought were forces in the world that were against me… I think I probably had a pretty big chip on my shoulder."
Born in 1968, Michael was raised in what he calls a "complicated 1970s family" and over the years he learned to use that confusion to his advantage, calling it "good background for making a show like Tony & Ziva because I am now comfortable with discomfort". Raised in Massachusetts, Michael attended four different colleges but never graduated, choosing instead to pursue acting. He made his acting debut on The Cosby Show, then found fame on the hit ABC soap opera Loving and later its spin-off The City.
In 2000, Michael joined Jessica Alba in the now cult classic Dark Angel, playing cyber-journalist Logan Cale against Jessica's genetically enhanced runaway super-soldier Max. The pair became engaged in real life, but the relationship ended in 2003.
"I loved that show, but at that period in my life, I was going through a particularly earnest streak, and I was fighting against what I thought were forces in the world that were against me… I think I probably had a pretty big chip on my shoulder," he says of the early 2000s. "Then I came to NCIS [in 2003] and I wanted to flip that because there's also a class clown that lives inside me. What I wanted to do was find that part of me that needs to fill every space with words, that needs to flood and control the conversation with personality and effect. DiNozzo allowed me to utilize my worst, most talk-show-host personality quirks."
In the real world, Michael has done the work, but has Tony? "Putting those shoes back on, I think, 'Look at that guy now - where is he? How is he different?' and what's great to me is I don't really think about the audience too much because if I tell the truth, if I show what Tony has learned, it should resonate."
Michael is also aware of the type of show Tony & Ziva should be for its audience, insisting "we are not here to tell you what to think or how to feel or teach you how to vote... This is a show if you like The Bourne Identity and Mission Impossible, but also liked Annie Hall."
But it's also a show about two iconic TV characters, who have spent the last two decades falling in and out of love, and still have yet to find their happily ever after. Cote left the show in 2013 in season 11, and Michael followed in 2015 during season 13; viewers learned at that time that Ziva, who had moved to Israel, was presumed dead after an attack on her farmhouse – and that she had kept her daughter with Tony a secret.
Tony then left the NCIS organization to raise the young girl, but in 2019 both returned to NCIS for an episode arc that revealed Ziva was alive, and they reunited off-screen in Paris. Michael also briefly returned in 2024 to the original series for a tribute to David McCallum.
Those years together on the set brought Michael and Cote closer than co-workers. "Sometimes when Cote and I talk – and you may get the sense that I am prone to digression – but we don't stay on one topic very long. We might be talking about star signs and UFOs and then types of food or wellness routines or spiritual modes, but the one thing we really never talk about is our relationship with each other," he says.
The pair don't rehearse together, and Michael reveals that – unsurprisingly – real life often bleeds onto the screen: "Cote always knows all of her lines because she's a professional, but if we get to a place in the scene where I don't know what the next line is I look at her and say, 'I don't know what to say to that.' And I'm really saying, 'I don't know what to say because I don't know my line.'"
Those moments have aired a few times on NCIS, he says, and teases that there is one in Tony & Ziva.
Expectations are high for the Paramount+ spinoff, and despite the disappointment some felt to learn, in the trailer, that Tony and Ziva are still not married, six years after they moved to France together, fans will be happy to know that the characters have retained what made them so special; both Michael and Cote are executive producers.
"I try to just look at Cote [as Ziva] and tell the truth," says Michael of being Tony. "That doesn't mean I always succeed, but to me, that's what Tony & Ziva is all about."