Former NCIS star Pauley Perrette portrayed fan favorite Abby Sciuto on the CBS drama for a decade and a half.
While Abby (Pauley Perrette) remains a pivotal and much-missed part of the NCIS machine, the CBS cr1me franchise has a number of other stars who have endeared themselves to viewers across its shows.
Leading stars Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J were just two of the stars who quickly cemented NCIS Los Angeles as a success in its own right when it debuted in 2009.
However, Perrette revealed in October 2020 on the podcast Kirsten’s Agenda with Kirsten Vangsness that Sam Hanna star LL Cool J had a similar complaint to her about memorizing the franchise’s lengthy and detailed scripts.
After all, NCIS LA was LL Cool J’s first appearance in a cr1me procedural drama, despite his previous success in music and on the big screen.
When host Vangsness asked Perrette, “Did you know you were going to retire? Did you make a decision after Broke? You did say you were coming out of retirement to do it.”
“I had absolutely retired and that was a strange period because I had been doing the same job for 15 years, 16 seasons, I started on JAG playing Abby – a forgotten fact!” Perrette responded.
“So that was strange just to like… Even when we weren’t working, people who… we were on hour-long dramas and then you work this many years and get two and a half months in the middle, which is our little hiatus thing…
“Even when I was on leave after my last day of work, it took me a minute to realize that I wasn’t counting the days like, ‘Oh, we have to go back on this day,’ because I didn’t have to.”
Perrette then returned to the fact that she had mentioned earlier in the podcast that no longer acting has given her more time to read.
Perrette, an avid reader, explained how her time on NCIS had taken the joy out of her favorite hobby due to her instinctively memorizing any text in front of her.
“Also, my book-reading thing…” she revealed. It’s interesting because when LL Cool J first started on NCIS LA, he was used to a completely different schedule and doing something completely different.
“It was literally the first or second episode, I believe, and I went to see them down on set.”
“He said to me because I’m such an avid book reader, I love books, but when I’m on a show all the time, especially for over a decade, I have this thing with me where I’m doing two pages of scientific dialogue with 12-letter words and I have to make it funny, so it was a lot of work.”
“We both had a lot of homework.” My brain changed so that if I read anything, even a book, I would memorize it, so reading became a real challenge for me.
“And I remember being in LL Cool J’s trailer with him at the time, and he said to me, ‘I’m having a lot of trouble reading books now like usual.'”
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what’s going on, our brains are getting trained to memorize everything.'”
“And good lord, I could memorize an entire book,” Perrette added.
Perrette continued, “I had to work my way back into that [enjoying reading] since leaving NCIS.” “I had no choice.”
Perrette may have left the world of acting behind her, but it appears that the struggle of distinguishing between reading and memorizing lines hasn’t stopped LL Cool J.
NCIS LA, now in its 14th season on CBS, continues to draw millions of viewers week after week, with LL Cool J still at the helm alongside co-stars O’Donnell, Eric Christian Olsen, and Kensi Blye.
He’ll also be a part of a historic event for the CBS franchise in January, when all three shows – NCIS, NCIS LA, and NCIS Hawaii – will cross over for the first time.
Related News – Be sure to get some more news when it comes to NCIS.