Before actor and producer Mark Harmon became a familiar face on NCIS, he sold shoes, quarterbacked a college football upset and caught actor John Wayne’s attention with a rather unusual tuxedo.
“You know, I believe we all do it together here,” he told CBS SUNDAY MORNING in 2013, explaining why he wouldn’t take sole credit for his NCIS’ success.
That team-first attitude makes a little more sense when you look at the life behind Leroy Jethro Gibbs. From football fields to family priorities, here are nine details Harmon has shared in his own words.
1. He helped UCLA pull off a major football upset. Harmon quarterbacked UCLA long before audiences knew him as Gibbs. In his first game for the Bruins in 1972, he helped beat defending national champion Nebraska 20–17, ending the Cornhuskers’ 32-game unbeaten streak.
“There wasn’t anybody on that UCLA team that didn’t think we could play with them,” he recalled in the National Football Foundation’s 2019 profile. Long before television audiences knew his face, he knew what it meant to trust his teammates against a formidable opponent.
2. John Wayne nicknamed him Rebel. When Harmon attended the National Football Foundation’s 1973 awards dinner as a scholar-athlete, he arrived without a tuxedo. He rented a dove-gray one with a frilly shirt, only to discover that everyone else wore black—a wardrobe choice that caught actor John Wayne’s eye.
“All night he called me, Rebel,” Harmon remembered in the foundation’s profile. Wayne even addressed his autograph to that nickname on Harmon’s event program, which the actor said he still had in 2019.
3. He once sold shoes for a living. Hollywood wasn’t Harmon’s only career option. Before committing to acting, he worked at an advertising firm and then took a national sales representative job with a shoe company.
Related: Mark Harmon Almost Wasn’t Cast as NCIS’ Gibbs
“I got a promotion to another ad-based job—a national sales rep position at a shoe company—so I was kind of a shoe salesman for about seven months,” he told Men’s Journal in its 2018 Q&A. He said a flight home from Boston, seated beside a man unhappy in his own job, prompted him to go to his workplace and give notice.
4. He gave a vintage Airstream a custom makeover. Harmon’s interest in working with his hands extends beyond Gibbs’ boat-building scenes. In a 2006 Sunset interview, he described buying an Airstream from a horse ranch in Arizona and giving it a custom bird’s-eye maple and white-birch interior, plus a painted checkerboard floor.
“It’s a 1972, 24-footer,” he told the magazine. What began as a plan to replace cabinet fronts grew into a more expensive project, but he described the finished trailer as practical.
5. His son’s first steps changed how he thought about work. A movie assignment in New Guinea gave Harmon a painful reminder of what a distant job could cost. His oldest son had just taken his first steps when Harmon left; three months later, the little boy walked up to him at the airport and grabbed his leg.
“And our oldest had just taken his first steps the day I left,” Harmon told CBS SUNDAY MORNING in 2013. He recalled telling his wife, actress Pam Dawber, that he didn’t want to keep making movies so far away while missing those moments at home.
6. He pulled a teenager from a burning car. In January 1996, two teenagers crashed a car near Harmon’s Los Angeles home, leaving one of them trapped inside the burning vehicle. Harmon broke a window with a sledgehammer and pulled out the injured passenger, Colin Specht, who survived.
“You just react. That’s all you do,” Harmon told CBS SUNDAY MORNING while describing the rescue. Even years later, he resisted taking credit and acknowledged the danger he had faced as a husband and father himself.
7. Gibbs’ name helped persuade him to take NCIS. Sometimes the detail that sells an actor on a role is surprisingly small. Harmon told Entertainment Tonight in 2023 that the name Leroy Jethro Gibbs grabbed his attention, and he pushed back when the character briefly received a different name during development.
“And then it went back and I was happy about it,” he said in the interview. The name mattered enough that he argued to restore it, helping preserve an unmistakable part of the character viewers came to know.
8. He checked every NCIS interrogation with a real agent. Gibbs’ interrogation scenes came with homework. Harmon developed a close working relationship with retired NCIS special agent and series technical adviser Leon Carroll Jr., whom he consulted about how a real investigator would handle those exchanges.
“There was never an interrogation I did on NCIS that I didn’t talk to him about what was right, or what he would do,” Harmon told AARP in 2023. Their collaboration eventually extended beyond television: they coauthored the nonfiction book Ghosts of Honolulu.
9. He doesn’t claim to have a secret formula for marriage. Harmon married Dawber in 1987, but he doesn’t package their relationship as a set of celebrity-approved instructions. When Fox News Digital asked him about the key to a successful marriage in 2023, he answered with gratitude rather than a grand theory.
“I don’t have any answers. I don’t have any key,” he said in the interview. Instead, he described himself as fortunate and lucky to share his life with her — a modest answer from someone audiences have watched for decades.
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