On the night of September 20, 2016, Wilmer Valderrama’s first episode of NCIS had just aired on the East Coast. Before it reached the West Coast, he posted a selfie taken on set.
He’s in a black cap and a plain white T-shirt, grinning, with one finger pointed straight at the camera. Mark Harmon is right behind him in a dark jacket, his arm around Valderrama’s shoulders, smiling like he’s in on the joke.
The caption was a recruiting poster: “Bossman #MarkHarmon & I want YOU!“
It was a funny choice of words, because that night Gibbs had just recruited him.
Harmon and Valderrama shared more than five seasons as Gibbs and Nick Torres, from 2016 until Harmon stepped away in 2021. On screen, Gibbs became the closest thing Torres ever had to a father. Off screen, Valderrama has spent years calling Harmon his “bestie.”
The Lone Wolf Gibbs Let In
Torres arrived in the Season 14 premiere, “Rogue,” as a deep-cover agent who had been off the grid in South America for years. His cover was blown, his sister was in danger, and he talked Gibbs into letting him help close the case. By the end of the hour, he was on the team.
He wasn’t an easy fit, and he wasn’t supposed to be.
“He doesn’t play well with others and he clashes the most with Mark,” Valderrama said at Comic-Con that summer. On set it went the other way. “Mark showed me the ropes, in an hour,” he told BuddyTV. “And in an hour and a half, him and I were laughing and high fiving and shaking hands after every take and hugging.”
He described the work the same way to another Comic-Con roundtable. “Mark Harmon and I, we do four page scenes together and so far it has been just delicious,” he said. “Mark pushes me, I push him and it’s a wonderful partnership.”
“Straight-Up Besties”
The selfie wasn’t a one-off. Over the next few years, Valderrama kept saying the same thing in different words.
Four months into the job, at the People’s Choice Awards in January 2017, he told CBS red-carpet reporters, “Mark Harmon and I are besties for sure.” He was even less subtle with Access Hollywood: “Mark Harmon and I are straight-up besties.”
In 2019, during the show’s 17th season, he put it more seriously. “Mark is someone that leads with kindness and his energy is beautiful,” he told ET. “We have quite a bromance going on, him and I.”
He still found time to joke, too. That same month, he admitted to People that he teases Harmon “all the time” about the Sexiest Man Alive cover Harmon landed back in 1986.
Harmon has always been the more private of the two. Most of what fans know about this friendship comes from Valderrama’s side and from the photos he posted. Harmon’s own steadiness, the quality that shaped Gibbs, is something we’ve written about in how he built the character.
The Accidental Father
On screen, the bond took longer to say out loud, which is very Gibbs.
When Torres was hit by a car in 2020 and ended up in the hospital, Gibbs showed up more openly worried than fans had ever seen him. Valderrama noticed. “Gibbs has become really an ‘accidental father figure’ to Torres,” he told TVLine in 2021. “For a time, Torres had no real direction as he was just going from mission to mission, and Gibbs gives him a family, one like he never had.”
Then came “Sangre,” in April 2021. Torres’ father, the man who walked out when he was a boy, turned up alive, then disappeared on him again. Valderrama has said Torres got in his car without knowing where he was going. He ended up at Gibbs’ house, where his boss was eating a steak he had grilled in his fireplace.
The scene ends on a look and a small smile.
“He just needed to be with Gibbs,” Valderrama said of that scene. “Gibbs reminds him of the father he never had.”
Five Years to the Day
Season 19 premiered on September 20, 2021, five years to the day after Torres’ first episode. Three weeks later, on October 11, Gibbs stayed behind in Alaska. “I’m not going back, Tim,” he told McGee. It was episode 418, and his last as a series regular.
The goodbye in Alaska belonged to McGee. Torres just had to keep going without him, which is maybe the most Gibbs lesson there is.
When NCIS reached 450 episodes in 2023, Valderrama made sure Harmon got the credit. “It is also a big tribute to Mark Harmon, who led this beautifully for hundreds of episodes and was able to keep this boat with the integrity and the value set that it still performs today,” he told ET. “We can’t take credit for the first 300.”
The Promise That Found Torres
There’s a scene in the second episode of NCIS most fans had long forgotten.
In 2003, in “Hung Out to Dry,” Gibbs met Billy Fuentes, a little boy whose Marine father had just died. He went back to the family’s house and worked on the treehouse Billy’s dad never got to finish.
Twenty-three years later, the 500th episode brought Billy back, grown up and played again by Austin Marques. Gibbs, it turned out, had once promised him that NCIS would always be there for him. Billy needed that help now. NCIS was being shut down, and his sister was in trouble. The first person he went to was Nick Torres.
Torres had never met him. Billy said he had heard a lot about him.
The show didn’t need to explain who he’d heard it from.
Still Pointing at the Camera
Valderrama is still Torres in Season 24, on a team where Tony DiNozzo is now the director and McGee finally got to call him “probie”. Harmon, meanwhile, is back on screen as Gibbs this season on NCIS: Origins, in a present-day mystery that runs through every episode.
They aren’t in the same bullpen anymore. But the show keeps acting like they are.
Gibbs recruited a loose cannon who didn’t trust anybody, and that loose cannon ended up being the agent a grieving kid from 2003 knew to look for.
“I want YOU,” the caption said. It turns out Gibbs meant it.
