Daniela Ruah Reveals She Thought NCIS Was Over for Her After Failed Audition

Having started as a one-location show that only occasionally brought its other departments up, NCIS ’ franchise eventually decided to make it up to snubbed numerous offices and gave them proper spinoffs, most of which have run for years before being canceled (we don’t count NCIS: Hawai’i here).

Coming as the first ever challenger to start this trend and expand the NCISverse, NCIS: Los Angeles, launched back in 2009, had to be extremely cautious about the way the characters and their storylines were introduced so that the series would eventually get good ratings.

The spinoff was indeed a huge success, with viewers showing all their love and support for the characters and their actors, though one of the cast members initially landed their role thanks to a pure accident.

Stopping by her former colleagues Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo’s podcast Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch, Daniela Ruah, who in NCIS: Los Angeles portrayed Special Agent Kensi Blye, followed de Pablo’s suit and opened up about her weird experience of auditioning for the role in the franchise.

According to Ruah, she genuinely felt like she’d had zero chances of landing the role since “my first audition, I was still living in New York, and I had a ginormous speech, which I did, and then I screwed up towards the end.”

The actress continued saying that her numerous attempts to deliver the speech in the right way eventually hadn’t worked out and she’d left the room reassured that she’d now had to seek other job offers instead of that one.

Ruah then revealed that she had eventually received a callback urging her to go back to Los Angeles for a second audition in the studio. The actress spent some time wondering what had actually made casting directors opt for her candidacy.

She then explained saying that “when we were shooting the pilots with you guys, I remember asking Shane Brennan, who was the creator of our show, and I was like, ‘How did I make it past that first audition? And he was like, ‘You kind of got lucky because they sent it to me on a very, very small video that I couldn't really see very well, but you just had this international energy and vibe, which is what we wanted for the character, and so we gave you another shot.’”

Now that Ruah has been a significant part of NCIS’ franchise for so many years, it’s hard to imagine someone else portraying Kensi instead of her, though it could have been a pretty much possible option if it hadn’t been for an ill-formatted video.

Guess we should give credit to the 2010s’ weird technologies for Ruah’s appearance in NCIS after all.

Source: Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch