Now slated to anchor NBC’s Suits: L.A. spinoff, actor Stephen Amell had his sights set on a different offshoot show right before he auditioned for the Los Angeles lawyer role.
Amell revealed that he tried out for the role of a younger Leroy Jethro Gibbs character in NCIS: Origins just days before he auditioned for his Suits: L.A. character Ted Black, a former federal prosecutor from New York who started over in Los Angeles and built a legacy for himself. The role for the NCIS prequel went to Austin Stowell.
“My focus wasn’t on Suits L.A. Two auditions came in [that week]. One was via Zoom, and this audition for suits was actually in person, which I remember being incredibly excited about because I don’t remember the last time [that happened,” Amell told Michael Rosenbaum on a new episode of the latter’s Inside of You podcast.“My actual focus that week was on an audition that I had on Wednesday for the prequel to NCIS. It was playing the younger version of [Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs].”
Even though he hadn’t fully watched NCIS, Amell said he was “excited by the prospect” of a network show and “pilot season” which “doesn’t happen that much anymore.”The actor’s television credits include Starz’s Heels and Greg Berlanti’s CW Show Arrow — which he recalled “filming til 3 in the morning.” He recalled feeling like his NCIS: Origins audition went well.
“This came in, and I thought that the audition went extraordinarily well. I got great feedback,” Amell added. “I hadn’t looked at the sides for Suits L.A. yet, and then I found out on Thursday afternoon, after getting not just good feedback, but, like, good intel, like, ‘We think [the series] is gonna move forward,’ all of a sudden, it was dead, and I felt like someone, somewhere along the line, had, like, c–k-blocked me… So I didn’t know what was going on, and I was frustrated.”
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This led Amell to channel his frustration and other emotions into his audition for Suits: L.A. the Friday after learning that the NCIS gig wouldn’t move forward. He spoke about running lines for the audition with his 11-year-old daughter, who got a kick out of one of the lines involving Amell’s Black saying he would “cut off my left ball” if a client didn’t sign. He recalled having a “breakdown” on the phone with his wife after a combination of news along with the NCIS “slight.”
“I walked into that audition with kind of no fear,” Amell said. “[I] tried to be a lot looser and more spontaneous than I think probably a lot of other people were because this guy’s a lawyer. This guy’s supposed to be the smartest guy in the room, but, concurrently, I just figured everyone was going to be stone-cold serious, so let’s just have a little bit of fun.”
His offer, which he got on Tuesday, was “conditional on a network test” without another candidate for the role. He revealed that he had gotten texts from people in the industry he knew that pointed to NBC vetting him.
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Amell was ultimately confirmed for the pilot episode of the drama offshoot series, created by Aaron Korsh who knew “15 seconds into [the] audition that [Amell was] Ted Black, in February. He has since showed the pilot episode to his daughter, with whom he has a joke “left ball lives” because the client does actually sign in the show.
“Retrospectively, I got the job that I was supposed to get,” Amell concluded. “Aaron Korsh writes a very fun, digestible show that has a lot of heart, and I think that’s why the original has resonated with people in such a crazy, seismic way to the point where Heels going to Netflix, you literally say I hope it gets the Suits treatment.”
