The NCIS Character Everyone Forgets Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan Played

Before he was writing half the shows on Paramount+, Taylor Sheridan was an actor. The man behind shows like “Yellowstone” and “Tulsa King” and the scripts for films including “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” cut his teeth with screen work, a pastime he occasionally returns to when he needs someone to play, say, a cool cowboy who’s dating Bella Hadid.

Years before he became known as a Hollywood cowboy, I knew Sheridan as a mysterious man named Danny Boyd in the plucky teen detective show “Veronica Mars,” and as the hate-worthy cop Deputy David Hale on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy.” Those may have been two of Sheridan’s most high-profile TV roles, but they’re far from his only acting credits. He’s had bit parts going all the way back to “Walker, Texas Ranger” in 1995, and can be seen in one-off roles in shows like “CSI,” “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “NYPD Blue,” and even “Star Trek: Enterprise.” He also pops up in one episode of the wildly popular “NCIS” franchise, in what would turn out to be his last role before stepping behind the camera.

Sheridan doesn’t appear in the flagship “NCIS” show, which is notably still one of the most-watched shows on TV. Instead, he takes a turn at the guest star plate on “NCIS: Los Angeles,” the also popular but slightly lighter West Coast spinoff series that ran from 2009 to 2023. The show follows a team of Naval investigative agents headed up by characters played by Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J, and Sheridan continued his trend of playing authority figures here with a guest appearance as Navy Captain Jennings. Jennings doesn’t actually get to do a ton, but he plays a hero-coded character rather than a villain, and the episode features a lot of the messy, contradictory nationalistic tendencies that are a signature of both the “NCIS” world and Sheridan’s own work.

If you miss seeing Sheridan on screen (is that even possible after those Travis-centric “Yellowstone” episodes?), it’s worth noting that the episode in question is called “Enemy Within.” It’s a late season 2 outing that tracks a possible assassination plot involving a Venezuelan politician. “The Pacific” actor Joshua Bitton also appears, as do Myndy Crist (“Dark Skies”) and telenovela star Eduardo Yáñez. After appearing in this episode in 2011, Sheridan disappeared from the screen for five years, finally coming back into the spotlight to play a character credited simply as “cowboy” in his best film, “Hell or High Water.”

Sheridan’s acting career is interesting, as it suggests that before he disappeared into Western-tinged roles and became known as a real-life rancher, the actor-writer was typecast as cops and military men. He continued to play a few more authority figures after his “NCIS: Los Angeles” role, playing a CIA field officer in the Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon-led film “12 Strong” and Sergeant Major Cody Spears in “Lioness,” his CIA thriller series starring Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña. At some point, Sheridan seemed to trade in his prop badge and gun for a cowboy hat and set of spurs, a move that’s made him a polarizing but very popular Hollywood hitmaker.