NCIS Star Mark Harmon Had One Rule About Sick Days On The CBS Series

“I made the grave mistake of staying home, and I was sent a car, and I went to set, and Mark came up to me, and — he was kind enough, but he was very stern, and he said, ‘You come to set, we decide when you’re sick,'” de Pablo paraphrased. “It was like, ‘You come to set, and then we will determine how we address this.'” 

The actress says the lesson learned from the exchange was “don’t take a sick day,” but in retrospect, the situation sounds pretty skewed. Harmon wasn’t added as a producer on the series until season 6, but this incident reportedly happened in season 3, which means he would have been telling his coworker he had final say on whether or not she was ill enough to miss work when he wasn’t her boss. According to the story, he asked her to come in to work with a fever, which could have been both a contagion risk and dangerous for her health.

De Pablo says “mentally,” the situation “just did a trick on [her],” but she also says she never got sick again — or at least, never stayed home — after the conversation. From an outside perspective, Harmon doesn’t come across well here at all (other co-stars including Michael Weatherly and Pauley Perrette have reported negative experiences with him as well), but the situation apparently helped de Pablo realize that absent cast members can hold up an entire production. “When you think about it, you know, anyone in production can do a job, better, worse, whatever,” she said in the podcast. “But no one can play McGee, no one can play DiNozzo … So you really had to be there, and that’s a lot of pressure.” 

Apparently, the appeal of returning to the world of “NCIS” outweighs any lingering feelings of pressure de Cote might have: she’ll be reprising her role as Ziva in an upcoming spinoff series titled “NCIS: Tony & Ziva,” which will reunite her with Weatherly. There’s no word yet on whether Harmon will be involved — or whether he’s relaxed his sick day policy in the past two decades.