For eight seasons, Chilean-born American actress Cote de Pablo played fan favorite Ziva David
on the long-running CBS procedural NCIS ...
"I suppose it is getting a little 'ripe' in here."
"I'm not ripe.
You, on the other hand, are pungent."
A Mossad liaison officer from Israel who spoke more than five languages, David had quite
the impressive resume.
But what about the actress behind the brilliant and deadly assassin?
Roll call
Cote de Pablo's real name is actually Maria Jose de Pablo Fernandez.
When de Pablo and her family moved from Santiago, Chile to Miami in 1989, many of the kids at
her school couldn't properly pronounce the 10-year-old de Pablo's name, so she asked
that they instead call her "Coté," a common Chilean nickname for "Maria Jose."
She spelled it C-O-T-Y for a time, but changed the "Y" to an "E" when she learned it was
the name of a long-running makeup and perfume line.
De Pablo didn't even start learning English until she moved to Miami, but found that attending
a diverse performing arts high school helped her to better communicate with people in her
new country — and feel more at home.
De Pablo says she found her "tribe": "Not Chilean or Argentinean or Brazilian or Russian,"
but simply "actors."
Borderline Broadway
In 2005, de Pablo was in the cast of the musical The Mambo Kings in San Francisco, performing
in a trial run before the show was set to make its Broadway debut.
During a break in the production, she booked her role on NCIS, making the tough decision
of choosing TV over the stage.
"Don't speak!"
"Bullets Over Broadway.
Woody Allen."
"Very good!"
Fortunately for her, that production of The Mambo Kings closed after the trial and never
even made it to Broadway, so de Pablo clearly made the right choice.
Cote the crooner
Her musical talents did not go to waste on NCIS.
Originally, de Pablo didn't want her character to sing in the show, even though the producers
had toyed with the idea.
After two years, she caved.
In the Season 6 premiere, she sang the Tom Waits tune "Temptation" while undercover...
"My will has disappeared / Now confusion is oh so clear."
Yep: that's her real voice.
The song also appeared on the two-disc NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack, released in 2009,
which also featured a performance from castmate Pauley Perrette.
A quick study
Playing David required some intense research.
While de Pablo speaks fluent English and Spanish, her character speaks ten languages, including
Turkish, German, Russian and Arabic.
When de Pablo landed the role, she only had 48 hours to memorize a huge monologue in Hebrew
and spoke several languages throughout her run.
"(speaking Hebrew)"
How did she pull off such daunting acting tasks?
With the help of language coaches, she learned the lines "like a prayer," chanting them,
until she knows them phonetically.
De Pablo's departure
After eight years and more than 180 episodes, de Pablo decided to leave NCIS in 2013 for
then-undisclosed reasons.
Within days of the news, grief-stricken fans started a Change.org petition aimed at getting
de Pablo to reconsider and inundated CBS with e-mails and letters, many with paper clips
inside, a reference to this iconic Ziva scene ...
"I feel like I know him."
"Mossad?"
"Maybe."
"Internet dating?"
"I will kill you 18 different ways with this paperclip."
CBS says they offered de Pablo a lot of money to stay … and then even more money … but
she wouldn't bite.
In 2016, de Pablo finally revealed that she left the show because the scripts weren't
"good enough" and "the character was not being treated with the respect that she deserved."
Choosy Cote
After leaving NCIS, de Pablo called her experience on the show "an incredible school" that prepared
her for a wide variety of acting experiences, including her emotional role as a heartsick
wife in the 2015 film The 33, about the 2010 Chilean mining disaster.
But if you're wondering why you haven't seen de Pablo on screen lately, it's by choice:
She credits her NCIS success with giving her the time and freedom to be choosy, only taking
on "out of the box" roles that give her a "a creative freedom which may lead to incredible
happiness."
Sounds like being choosy is a smart choice!
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