What does NCIS use for dead bodies? The autopsy-room method, straight from producer Mark Horowitz
Executive producer Mark Horowitz casts every corpse on NCIS himself, and the job is far stranger than it looks from the sofa. Here is how the show fills its autopsy table week after week, and why living actors usually beat the very expensive dummies.
Ducky and Jimmy have opened up several hundred bodies across NCIS's run, and almost none of them are what you would assume. The process starts with a phone call telling someone they are about to die.
Most of the corpses on NCIS are living people. Executive producer Mark Horowitz casts them personally, drawing on extras, stunt performers, and occasionally full actors depending on whether the character needs to appear alive at any point in the episode. If the character is dead for the entire episode, an extra usually gets the job. A silicone-and-plaster dummy only gets built when the script calls for injuries too severe to fake with makeup on a breathing human.
Why living actors beat the dummies
Cost is part of it. A Wall Street Journal report in 2011 put the price of a purpose-built mannequin at close to $8,000, with weeks of lead time. But Horowitz has consistently argued the real reason is photographic. Speaking to CBS around season 10, he said the production prefers real people because of how light behaves on actual skin:
"There's something about real skin, the way light bounces off of it," Horowitz told CBS.
Prosthetic bodies are convincing up close — he has said you can put a camera right on them — but makeup applied to a living face gives the camera something silicone cannot.
Casting a corpse is harder than it sounds
Horowitz's standard is blunt: nothing looks worse on screen than a badly played dead body. By his account, roughly half the people who audition cannot hold their eyes still, whether the eyes are open or shut. He also warns candidates about the physical reality before they commit, telling Screen Rant in 2022 that he tells them outright it will be "the worst job you'll ever have" and screening hard for anyone who might flinch.
What he warns them about, specifically:
- The table — hard, cold, and metal, with examination lights pointed at a largely undressed performer for hours.
- The drawers — the sliding refrigeration units are a genuine problem for anyone claustrophobic, so he raises it at audition.
- The makeup — one man walked off set because his own death makeup disturbed him too much to continue.
- The room — a full crew, a director, and two actors working around your body while you hold completely still.
Brian Dietzen, who has been performing fake autopsies as Jimmy Palmer since the back end of season 1, gave BuzzFeed in 2013 the most precise description anyone has managed:
"Your whole body is freezing and your spot is on fire."
David McCallum, who visited real morgues as research for Ducky, told a CBS News Q&A that keeping the performers warm and comfortable was the department's main preoccupation. His one technical complaint about the fake bodies: they lack an omentum, the filmy membrane over the abdomen.
When the show builds a body instead
The dummies come from W.M. Creations, the effects house that has supplied NCIS's cadavers for years. Getting one made takes about an hour in the chair. Makeup artists fit a skull cap, then layer silicone across the face — slower-curing purple first, faster-curing green on the back of the head where detail matters less — before adding plaster bandages to support the mould. Nostrils are kept clear by hand rather than with straws, because a straw can be knocked.
Afterwards the artists match the performer's hair against physical samples, photograph the eyes both open and shut in case the script changes, and take body measurements so a matching torso from stock can be fitted to the one-off head. Horowitz's own summary of the finished article: a very expensive doll.
For the record: several walls at W.M. Creations hold plaster heads cast from people who came through the studio. When one of them dies, the head is moved across to the office wall. Jim Gunter, cast for season 11's "Homesick", was turning 72 the week his face was moulded. Asked about his birthday plans, he said he intended to survive it.
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