NCIS: Los Angeles exclusive: Eric Christian Olsen on 250th episode deleted scenes
Speaking to CarterMatt as a part of our recent interview all about him co-writing this episode, Eric Christian Olsen confirmed that the totality of footage for “Mother” was substantially longer than the actual runtime — a rarity for most CBS shows:
The great irony is that I wrote an episode that was 12 minutes too long — usually a lot of episodes are three minutes or four minutes [over], but mine was twelve. So, a lot of [comedic] through-lines were cut. At some point, I’m going to try to get the unedited version on CBS All Access and do an interview talking about why we cut, what we cut and that whole process. It’s interesting.
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Just to give you a small sense of some of the footage that didn’t make it into the episode, Olsen told us a story about a memorable scene for Sam and Callen that was taken from the actors’ rapport in real life:
One of my favorite scenes in the entire episode was a great scene with Sam and Callen where they have a moment where Sam kind of calls Callen out for being nervous. Callen says ‘I’m not nervous,’ and Sam says ‘I know you’re nervous. We’ve been partners for ten years and you’ve got tells. I know what your tells are.’ Those are literally the tells that Chris O’Donnell has, and it’s LL Cool J calling out Chris O’Donnell for the tells that he has. That scene ended up getting cut, but I was just sitting behind the monitor with tears in my eyes watching all of this stuff unfold. It was great. The process was amazing.
We’ll see if any of this bonus footage makes it online in the future, but let’s just say that we’re hoping to check it out. Olsen put a lot of love into this episode, and recognized that this was both a tribute to these characters and a love letter to all the fans who have enjoyed the series for so long.
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