There’s a Gary Cole for everyone.
Whether you know him from “The West Wing” or “Veep,” “The Good Wife” or “Office Space,” “Dodgeball” or “Midnight Caller,” you most likely know his face.
For a while he was the “hero of the schoolyard” with his daughter’s classmates for appearing in “Cadet Kelly” alongside Hilary Duff. These days, though, it's his role as Alden Parker on the long-running CBS crime procedural “NCIS” that has him stopped in the street.
Centered on the U.S. Navy’s investigative unit in Washington, D.C., the show is currently airing Season 23.
“It’s pretty powerful, that impact,” says Cole of the program's devoted broadcast audience. “So a lot of people have followed the show and they have followed it, some of them, forever,” he adds.
Cole's character was brought in during Season 19 to run the team after Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) left. In a Veterans Day special, a first for the franchise, “NCIS” and “NCIS: Origins” will cross over with back-to-back episodes Tuesday. A historical mystery in “Origins” — featuring a guest appearance from Harmon on the show that follow Gibbs' early career — will find its way to the modern day on “NCIS,” which airs directly after.
The Associated Press spoke to Cole about the success of the show, the real service members he’s met and those classic “NCIS” freeze frames. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Was the popularity of “NCIS” a plus or minus when you were thinking about taking the role?
COLE: I didn’t really look at the effect of how big or small the audience would be, because today things are much different. I mean, nothing has kind of the large, overwhelming impact that television shows of 25 years did in terms of their audience, where you could be swallowed up by just one image.
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I’m old enough to say that I was on television when, here in the States, there were three channels. That was it. Those were your choices. And once they were on and then rerun once, maybe twice if you were lucky, they really were gone.
Now … if you look hard enough, you can find pretty much anything you’ve done your whole career. It’s being broadcast somewhere.
AP: Is there any show you wish would disappear and never been seen again?
COLE: Not so much a show. There’s probably a few network movies of the week, we used to call it, that I kind of cut my teeth on.
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By that I don’t mean choice of material, although that was part of it too. But it was just kind of a laboratory to get comfortable in front of a camera without a lot of — if you’re on a series and it’s successful, your visibility is just there. If you’re doing a lot of learning and making mistakes and correcting them, you don’t want to do that on a weekly basis in front of everybody.
AP: How have they changed Alden to be a bit more you?
COLE: They didn’t want him to be similar to Gibbs. They certainly wanted, you know, they wanted somebody that you could buy as a leader. Our old producer, who has retired since, had a great line about, kind of, just an inside joke about the show, which is that: In the original “NCIS,” all the kids were eager to please the father, meaning Gibbs, right? They were like wondering what his reaction was going to be and would they be, you know, under the gun if they made a mistake or made a wrong move? There was a little bit of, you know, apprehension around him. And so now he flipped it and said, what if the father were to leave? And the crazy uncle shows up? And how are they going to react to them? And they’re not quite sure at first, like, “What is the story with this guy?” ... And I liked that.
AP: Did you speak to veterans since being on the show?
COLE: We’ve got a great tech guy with us named Mike Smith who has set up numerous field trips and interactions. Katrina (Law, co-star) and I visited an aircraft carrier about a year and a half ago and spent the day on what they call family day. … And we actually go to sea and they proceeded to do what they do and show us literally planes landing, planes taking off. And we got to see things that normally, you know, civilians wouldn’t see. And just to be with the sailors and interact with them. A lot of them knew the show. A lot knew other stuff I had done. We visited a real NCIS office out here in California.
AP: How do they feel in the (real) NCIS office?
COLE: They were very curious, but mostly about character stuff. They weren’t even worried about procedurals because they know, you know, it’s a television show, right? So, but, what I realized when I went in there, this is funny: Don’t tell anybody this, but I said, I looked at them and their average age, the guy that was leading them was probably 20 years younger than me. And every agent was barely 30 years old — if. So I was like, you know, based on this, if this is the reality, I should have retired 15 years ago.
AP: Do you ever, when you are coming to the end of a scene, freeze because you know they’re going to do the fade to black and white?
COLE: No. We joke about them, they call them, what do they say? They call it a poof movement, or a poof moment. “Oh, that’s definitely gonna be a poof. You’re gonna get a poof.” POOF.
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You know, somebody’s gonna choose it. And it’s certainly not gonna be me or anybody else in the cast, that is going to be in charge of figuring out where your poof movement is. So best to leave it to higher minds.
AP: That’s brilliant, I didn’t know how to describe them.
COLE: This might be mythological lore, I’m told that there is a sound that goes with that, right? That is, when it’s frozen? I’m told, I don’t know that I believe this, but that that is actually the voice of Don Bellisario, the original creator, into a microphone with reverb on it, where he just went, “poof.” Now, you can believe what you — let the internet go crazy now.
I was told that, and I have no reason not to believe it, you know, because I call (co-star) Sean Murray the show historian, because he’s been there for 23 years, and I think he’s the one that told me that. I always forget who told me what, but you know, I’ll blame it on him.