Katrina Law’s Daughter Asked to Be on NCIS. Then She Was
One day on the NCIS set, Katrina Law‘s daughter walked up to a writer and asked for a job.
“I want to be on the show,” Kinley Andreen told Scott Williams, who would later write the episode she appeared in. Then she made her case. “I want to help my mommy solve the case.” And then the part that stopped him: “And I speak Mandarin.”
Williams, Law recalled, went, “Oh.”
A year and a half later, he came back and asked if Kinley was serious. She still had to audition. She recorded it, it went to the network and the casting producers, and she memorized six pages of sides in less than 20 minutes. “She knocked the audition out of the park,” Law said. “That’s how she got her part. Basically, she pitched her own story line.”
On November 10, that episode reached CBS. Law’s 7-year-old daughter made her acting debut in Season 24’s “Speechless,” playing Chloe, an 8-year-old girl the team finds hiding alone in her apartment after her Marine mother goes missing.
Quick answer: Kinley Andreen, Katrina Law’s daughter, guest-starred as Chloe in the NCIS Season 24 episode “Speechless,” which aired on CBS on November 10. Scott Williams wrote the hour after Kinley asked to be on the show and mentioned she spoke Mandarin. Law has called it her favorite episode of television she’s ever done.
She Had Been on That Set for Years
This wasn’t a child dropped onto a soundstage she didn’t know. “Kinley has been coming to set with me for the past four years, so she is a set baby,” Law told Good Housekeeping the day before the episode aired.
The people she works with already knew her. “Because Kinley knows them so well, they have literally adopted her as their own daughter, the entire cast and crew,” Law said. “There’s not a single person on this show that wouldn’t just take her under their wing and just make sure she was okay.”
Most of Kinley’s scenes were with Gary Cole and Brian Dietzen. She had already rehearsed the lines at home with her mom, and those run-throughs went fine. Then she had to say them with the actors themselves. “The first time during rehearsal, she would have to say the lines with them, and she was fangirling,” Law said. “It was really cute!”
“Mommy, I Know My Lines”
Law was the one who got flustered.
She has called the work “a precarious balance” between being an actor, a mom, and an acting coach. She was tired in a way she hadn’t been before, she said, because she was all of those things at once. At one point she was running lines with Kinley, trying to make sure her daughter hit every beat. Kinley was already fine. “She’s just like, ‘Mommy, I know my lines,'” Law told TV Insider.
When the cameras were ready, Law realized what she hadn’t prepared for: her own part. “I don’t know what my lines are,” she remembered thinking. “I literally didn’t know what my lines were.” She had been so focused on Kinley that she had to grab her stand-in and run them again.
“Meanwhile, my daughter’s just like, ‘I’m prepared. I’m seven,'” Law said. “I was like, ‘OK, show-off.'”
There were stage-mom moments too, the kind that happen when someone yells cut and a 7-year-old goes back to being a 7-year-old. Law heard herself saying, “No, you can’t scream!” and then worried the crew would think her child was a handful, before remembering that everyone on that set already knew her. In the next breath, she would be watching Kinley work and tearing up. “I’m so insanely proud of her,” she said.
What “Speechless” Was
Williams wrote the episode, and Marc Roskin directed it. In the official CBS description, the team finds 8-year-old Chloe hiding alone in her apartment, her Marine mother missing, and then discovers “the shy witness is hiding a surprising skill that just might crack the case wide open.” The hour, CBS said, “tests just how far a parent will go to protect family.”
That surprising skill is Mandarin, which Kinley actually speaks. Law said her daughter knocks it out of the park, and that getting to go from Jessica Knight to proud mama, even inside the same scene, was “mind-blowing.” Knight is the one who finds Chloe, hiding under a sink, and the two of them share the screen as an agent trying to reach a frightened child and, underneath that, a mother acting across from her own daughter.
Law thanked Roskin for letting her move back and forth in those scenes, so Kinley wasn’t getting notes from every direction at once. “It was such a beautiful thing to be able to flow back and forth between mom and actor and acting coach, and just be able to see Kinley grow in this process,” she said. “From the first time she messed up a line to the last time she messed up a line … just seeing the growth in one episode was amazing.”
She has already called it her “favorite episode of television” she’s ever done, and “the most beautiful experience,” because she got to act across from her daughter. She also said she can’t wait to keep doing it.
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