Part of telling a good story is knowing how to end it. After 13 seasons of playing Tony DiNozzo on “NCIS,” Michael Weatherly had figured it out: it involved a death, a surprise, and a quick exit. But no spoilers here.
Weatherly wrapped his final episode of the long-running procedural at midnight on a Friday in late April, caught the redeye from California to New York City, and was shooting CBS’ new dramedy “Bull” by Monday. “There was a considerable amount of concern that I didn’t talk to anyone about it—maybe my wife,” Weatherly admits. But there isn’t time to dwell on leaving behind DiNozzo and the role that built the bulk of the actor’s career.
“He’ll Get You Off” reads the tagline for the episodic series that follows a courtroom trial analyzer and his team. A cross between a psychologist and a slightly sociopathic ringleader, Dr. Jason Bull uses manipulation and jurors’ private information to spin storylines that routinely buy his clientele a “not guilty” verdict.
“I saw him as a sort of junkie for human behavior,” says Weatherly of his new character, a stark departure from the wisecracking open book that was DiNozzo. “There’s a mystery to him. He’s trying to figure something out that’s deeply personal, whether it’s about himself or something that happened to him. I have all my little secret backstories that I love to build, but I have no idea if they’re going to be consistent with what they write!”
Bull’s story is loosely built around the early career of Dr. Phil McGraw, of “Dr. Phil” fame, who launched one of the most successful trial consulting firms to date. His celebrity profile skyrocketed after regularly appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and winning a monumental court case against Texas beef companies for the billionaire talk show host.
“People sometimes are very dismissive of Phil McGraw, and I think that’s a sort of narrow take on someone who has a talk show that you’ve watched and think you understand,” says Weatherly. “I think Phil McGraw is a person worth having a conversation with. He’s had some interesting experiences and certainly was very interesting for me. But I’m not playing him and I didn’t want to try and spend time with him in a way where I’m figuring him out”—partly because Bull isn’t McGraw. And also because the last time Weatherly played to the real person instead of the character, it didn’t turn out the way he wanted.
“I played Robert Wagner in a movie once [‘The Mystery of Natalie Wood’], and I made a terrible mistake, which is I played him instead of playing myself in their situation,” he explains. “And I tried really hard to not do an imitation. But I did. I was very bad.” So why did he take the part in the first place? “Peter Bogdanovich was directing and I really wanted to work with Bogdanovich! That and my stepmother told me I had Robert Wagner’s hair when I was 18.” (Weatherly once considered a career in standup comedy. A few minutes with him and one can see why.)
So instead of approaching the role by analyzing Dr. Phil the individual, the actor sought out YouTube videos of McGraw’s trial science work. He also used Oscar nominee Gary Oldman and his owl inspiration.
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“I got to talk to him about ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,’ and he said he had an animal [in mind],” Weatherly explains in his dressing room near the Ridgewood, Queens, set of “Bull.” “He talked about the owl a little bit, and I just love Gary Oldman so much. I was so excited that I got a chance to ask him questions.”
Oldman’s owl inspired Bull’s distinct, dark-framed glasses. The “twinkle” in Marcello Mastroianni’s eye, as the actor describes it, and his bullwhip prop in Fellini’s “Eight 1/2” also made it into the collective character inspiration. But Bull’s fascination with sports—despite not being a sportsman—was all Weatherly. From baseball to golf, the psychologist often has a sports instrument of some sort in his hands during meetings with his team. Ultimately, the actor hopes it keeps Bull from ever getting too comfortable or too secure, “to remind himself of that space you get into, that frustration” that comes with inexperience.
For the actor, Bull is an amalgamation of his two most prominent roles, DiNozzo and Logan Cale of “Dark Angel”: An uncompromising man, “cerebral, internal, and righteous,” as the actor describes Logan, meets the damaged attention-seeker who accepts that justice is an ever-moving target. But it requires different acting muscles to play the one who influences justice’s sway.
The level of Bull’s baseness became clear for Weatherly in one mock courtroom scene that called for vulnerability. He performed straight down the line, imbuing Bull with the truthfulness the character was seeming to project. It wasn’t until later, when the narrative revealed it was all an act to get what he wanted, that Weatherly understood who he was playing.
“That manipulation makes him impossible to be in a relationship with. How do you get around that guy?” asks Weatherly. “I heard the other day, ‘The truth without compassion is cruelty.’ It’s not enough to tell somebody the truth, and there’s an interesting kind of thing that goes on with [Bull], that in his search for truth and his search for whatever that is, he’s bending light around black holes and doing all kinds of stuff that [makes you say], ‘Um, dude, aren’t you not supposed to do that?’ ”
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“House” creator Paul Attanasio also developed “Bull,” and Weatherly sees the similarities between Dr. House and Dr. Bull in their Machiavellian approaches to the end goal. Bull delivers his strongest manipulations often with tears in his eyes.
“I acted very differently in the final two episodes [of ‘NCIS’] than I would have had I not done Bull,” says Weatherly. “Bull put me into a position of being much more emotional, and once I played the character, I came back to ‘NCIS’ and it was like I couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. I was kind of done with DiNozzo. Not that I was restless or didn’t want to be there, but the character felt that he’d run his course.”
But coming from “NCIS” and its regular mix of interrogations, romantic comedy, and stunts with a gun holster, there was a versatility to the actor’s former storyline that he’s still trying to find with “Bull.”
“Here, I’m trying to find that same rich tapestry of behavior,” he says. “The experience deepens every day and there’s a wonderful group of new people for me to meet and work with. I miss my friends at ‘NCIS,’ but it has become abundantly clear to me that this was definitely a good call and the right move—plus, [I’m] back in New York City, where I was born and started my career. It’s a surreal experience going to work and seeing a bus go by with Bull on it.” Laughing at the thought, he heads back into rehearsal.
In the Big (‘New Jack’) City
When Michael Weatherly decided he wanted to be an actor in the spring of 1990, he dropped out of college and moved into a tiny New York City apartment on Thompson Street. “The first night I got in there my friend said, ‘What are you doing? You want to be an actor? That’s insane. You’re not an actor. You’ve never done anything! What was your major? Wasn’t it, like, political science?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know, but I kinda got into this whole thing,’ and I gave him my talk and he was not convinced.”
Weatherly himself wasn’t altogether convinced, but he picked up a copy of Backstage anyway, turned to the auditions, and set off to an open casting call for a film on 52nd Street and 11th Avenue.
“I got there and there was already a line of 300 people, so I got on line and I read the rest of Backstage. I had no idea what Backstage was. I had no idea how to become an actor! I just figured that seemed like a thing that you would do if you wanted to dive in—sort of like learning to swim by jumping into the middle of the ocean.
“I waited in line for a very long time—over an hour, shuffling forward and forward and forward—and finally got a number. Went up, stood in the middle of the stage, and everybody burst out laughing. I was the first white person they’d seen the whole morning because it was casting background for ‘New Jack City.’ ”
Weatherly didn’t get the role of “token white guy wandering around Harlem,” but the audition connected him with a photographer, then a manager, and finally a casting director. “Within six weeks I was testing for Betty Rae for ‘Guiding Light.’ ” Weatherly takes a mock puff of a cigarette and drops into a gravelly, pack-a-day smoker’s voice. “It was like, ‘You’re not very good but you have nice cheekbones and good hair. I think this could work.’ ” And so began another actor’s career with Backstage.
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