NCIS star Brian Dietzen recalls Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette saving him from showrunner’s intense challenge

• Brian Dietzen recalled a formative experience from the NCIS set in which Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette helped him pass one of series creator Donald P. Bellisario’s intense tests.
• The scene pushed him from almost having “a heart attack” to realizing his costars were “family,” he revealed on the first episode of his new podcast with Diona Reasonover, NCIS: Partners & Probies.
• “Families have been created” on the NCIS set, Dietzen tells EW ahead of NCIS‘ midseason return. It’s true for him, Reasonover, and “pretty much every one of our cast members.”

After 23 seasons on the air, a role on NCIS would be any actor’s dream. But it was once Brian Dietzen‘s nightmare.

Tuesday marks not just the midseason return of NCIS, but the launch of Dietzen and his on his-screen morgue-mate Diona Reasonover’s new podcast NCIS: Partners & Probies. CBS, which has aired NCIS since 2003 and sponsors the new podcast for the procedural’s obsessives, described the new venture in a release as a weekly opportunity to “[pull] back the curtain on the world of NCIS with revealing, heartfelt, and often humorous conversations with cast, crew, creatives and real-world experts.”

The inaugural episode features Dietzen and Reasonover, who have appeared on the series since seasons 1 and 15, respectively, interviewing each other about the very fundamentals of their places on the show.

Dietzen’s chief medical examiner Jimmy Palmer is one of only two remaining characters that provide links back to the very origins of the series, the other being Sean Murray’s senior field agent, Timothy McGee. It’s hard to imagine Dietzen as anything other than a rock for the constantly evolving series and its shifting cast, but he tells Reasonover about a “heart attack” of an early experience that nearly shook his confidence away.