American actor and director Michael Weatherly, popularly known as Agent Tony DiNozzo, a character he played in NCIS for 13 seasons, returns to the small screen as Dr. Jason Bull in a drama inspired by the early career of Dr. Phil McGraw, the founder of one of the most prolific trial consulting firms of all time.
Entitled Bull, the show premiered on Sept. 21 and airs every Wednesday at 9 p.m. on RTL CBS Entertainment. It revolves around the central character, an ultimate puppet master that combines psychology, human intuition and high tech data to learn what makes jurors, attorneys, witnesses and the accused tick.
In the procedural drama, Dr. Bull employs an enviable team of experts at Trial Analysis Corporation to shape successful narratives down to the very last detail. In high-stakes trials, Bull’s combination of remarkable insight into human nature, three Ph.D.’s and a top-notch staff creates winning strategies that tip the scales of justice in his clients’ favor.
In a phone interview with the Manila Standard, the 48-year-old TV star talked about the new character, which he describes as “a con-man who helps people in the most beautiful way.”
“I like the mystery, the enigmatic core of Dr. Bull to me, and I haven’t figured him out, I don’t know what his mystery is, but it’s a great engine inside the character and series,” Weatherly shared.
As he started his journey with Bull and seeing how the character behaved in different scenes, Weatherly was surprised by what came out of the character including his emotions and his propensity of becoming very manipulative.
“I have been into six episodes into making the show right now, and I think Dr. Bull himself enjoys being a little uncomfortable because I think he is a little bit of a control freak, he wants to understand what everybody’s thinking, and he wants to control outcomes, but I think he’s self-aware enough to know that that’s what he’s doing,” he explained.
The show has a lot of surprises in store for the viewers. Without giving away so much, Weatherly said that in one of the scenes he had to be on his underwear.
“Five days ago, I went to work as Dr. Bull, woke up in a field in his underwear next to a cow. All I can tell you is that I never expected that I would be doing something like that for a series. He is a very surprising character,” he revealed.
On the other hand, when asked about the series itself, the actor generously shared what the viewers can expect from the weekly drama.
“Bull is a sort of a combination between House and The Mentalist,” he said.
He furthered that each episode is close-ended, there are a few characters that will recur, and each episode has its own campaign. But the big hook for Bull, according to Weatherly, is plain and simple: understanding human behavior a little bit better.
“In the world we live in today, you just use another app, a diary app and of course, it’s linked to another app whether it’s Snapchat or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, or whatever. Nobody ever has that expectation of privacy anymore, and how that’s fundamentally changing people is part of what Bull is about: Psychology,” he concluded.
Weatherly began his acting career with a minor television role in The Cosby Show as Theo Huxtable’s roommate. He was later cast in the role of Cooper Alden, from 1992 to 1996, in Loving and later, The City.
As television director, he made his directing debut with the season-eight episode of NCIS titled “One Last Score,” which aired in March 2011, and also directed the police crime drama’s season 10 episode “Seek,” which aired in March 2013.
