Wilmer Valderrama Details the Gruesome Way He’d Want His NCIS Character to Die: ‘Like Denzel Washington in Training Day’

Wilmer Valderrama has brought to life Special Agent Nick Torres on CBS’ long-running primetime drama NCIS for eight seasons.

Now, the actor, 44, is predicting how this character might die.

During a panel at the 2024 Monte-Carlo Television Festival in Monaco on June 14, the That '70s Show star was asked, “If your character had to die, how would you like him to die?”

Valderrama gave a gruesome yet beautiful answer to how he’d want Torres’ storyline to end if it had to wrap up with a death scene.

“Like Denzel Washington in Training Day — just go out,” Valderrama said, referring to the 2001 film in which Washington’s character, Detective Alonzo Harris, dies in a blaze of machine gun fire.  

Valderrama, who has played Torres since 2016 and will continue the role in season 22 this fall, went on to detail Torres’ potential death sequence. 

“I think not being the bad guy [like Harris was], of course I'd like to die as a good guy,” he explained. “But defending my family somehow, just in a storm of bullets, I just see a storm of bullets just washing over me, just dying heroically with violins in the background and the rain is pouring.”

NCIS costar Brian Dietzen, who was also part of the panel discussion, chimed in with, “Maybe some white doves?”

Valderrama replied, “No, no doves. That's a little too Nicolas Cage.”  

Meanwhile, Dietzen, 46, envisioned a “beautiful,” slower death for his longtime character, Dr. Jimmy Palmer.

“I had actually thought about this before,” said Dietzen, who then brought up NCIS working with the ALS Association throughout the years.

“I think that having a character come down with ALS and seeing that progression over time, especially for someone who's a scientist, who's a doctor, whose control of his physical faculties and trying to cover it up over the course of time, but his mind still works until he finally passes, is something that, I mean, it's a terrible disease,” he continued. 

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Dietzen added that this would bring awareness to ALS research “to see what happens to someone who has operated over the course of the last many, many years, getting to this place and losing control of his physical ability to do his job.”

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“That would be beautiful, it would be tragic, it would be sad,” he said. “But I think it would be a pretty cool thing to do and to bring to light.”

NCIS airs on CBS and streams live and on demand on Paramount+.