Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo have had each other’s back since the beginning.

During a visit to Entertainment Weekly‘s Comic-Con video studio, the longtime NCIS castmates previewed their upcoming spinoff series NCIS: Tony & Ziva and also took a trip down memory lane.

Premiering Sept. 4 on Paramount+, Tony & Ziva catches up with the titular Tony DiNozzo (Weatherly) and Ziva David (de Pablo) in Europe, nine years after Weatherly departed NCIS and more than a decade since de Pablo bid farewell. Though Tony and Ziva are now co-parents to young Tali (Isla Gie), their relationship is as ambiguous as ever. But de Pablo still vividly recalls Weatherly coming in clutch during the filming of an intimate scene from their early days on the anchor series.

“Most people don’t know this, but during that scene, there was a dress — a dress came off,” she says. “Michael covered every part of my body because he was afraid that some of the crew could see parts of me. Not that that thought ever crossed my mind, because I was like, ‘No, this is the scene. I’m going to play the truth.’ But he, being Michael,” strived to shield de Pablo from unwanted exposure.

“It was very sweet,” de Pablo adds.

The scene in question takes place during “Under Covers,” the third episode of NCIS season 8. “Under Covers” opens with, well, Tony and Ziva under the covers of a hotel bed. The intrepid agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service first met each other mere episodes prior but had already embarked on a love affair for the ages.

“You can get off of me now,” Ziva tells Tony after a toss-around in bed.

“It’s only been 10 minutes, I have a reputation to protect,” he quips.

The pair are swathed in a billowing satin sheet that coils around them as they cavort. De Pablo had only appeared in a dozen episodes of television before she was cast as Ziva David in 2005, and recalls being stunned when Weatherly, a TV vet since the early ’90s, showed her just how controlled and precise you have to be when filming love scenes.

“This is the best part, which no one knows about,” de Pablo excitedly begins. “The scene where he’s on top of me, my head is like this, right? So the cameras are a certain way. He started holding, literally just holding my head up so I looked better and so the light could find my face. Of course, I’m not an expert like he is. I don’t know about cameras. I don’t know anything about acting. And I’m going, ‘Why is he tilting my head?’”

She adds, “I have so much appreciation for that because it’s immortalized. It’s a forever thing.”

Weatherly then jumps in to clarify that it wasn’t just years of screen acting experience that gave him such on-camera expertise — it was his years on daytime TV.

“I did a lot of soap operas when I was a young actor, like 500 episodes or something,” he says. “So you learn to make sure that everyone is okay in terms of lighting and in terms of clearing for cameras.”

Weatherly’s first major role came in 1992, when he was cast as Cooper Alden on the daytime soap Loving. Though the series didn’t have quite the staying power of sexagenarian titans like General Hospital or Days of Our Lives, it did run 12 years on ABC, then spun off into The City, where Weatherly reprised his role for a combined tenure of five years. Most daytime dramas air five episodes per week and run year-round, meaning Weatherly got a real acting boot camp out of his time on the series.

He jokes that he got so accustomed to adjusting for light and cameras that he’d “be in a bar, like the Red Lion Pub down on Bleecker Street in New York, which had lights up here, and I’d be talking to some girl, and her face would be in shadow, and I would move her in real life to be in the light. She’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’ Because in real life, she wants to be in the shadow, because the light’s in her eye, right? But an actress wants the light to be in her eye.”

De Pablo notes that because of experience on stage, she wasn’t as accustomed to TV’s regimented production circumstances, but Weatherly jokes it’s actually because “Your inner light is so strong.”

De Pablo rolls her eyes, seamlessly stepping back into the sarcastic Tony and Ziva dynamic: “Oh, there you go. All right, well played.”