Great Scott

He’s traveled through time and space, winning hearts and fans along the way. Now Scott Bakula takes command in NCIS: New Orleans, and the Big Easy has never looked better.

- Lynn Darling

IT IS A HEARTRENDING SCENE: two runaways lost in an alien landscape, trying to escape capture and a dreadful death. Exhausted, frightened, the heroine with liquid brown eyes fuses her gaze with her companion’s as they share a moment of perfect, soulful understanding.

Yeah, yeah, you say. Sheer Hollywood schmaltz. But try pulling off a scene like that, as Scott Bakula did, when you’re dressed in a diaper and your co-star is a chimp.

The easygoing star of the CBS series NCIS: New Orleans is nothing if not game. Over the course of a long career comprised of a dizzying number of TV series and movies, Bakula has played, among many others, a baseball player, a quarterback, the fearless commander of a galaxy-hopping spaceship, the gay companion of a flamboyant pianist, a no-good ex-husband, a dashing foreign correspondent. In the theater he has won a Tony nomination for his lead in a Broadway musical, romped his way through an off- Broadway comedy about stand-up comics, and starred in his own revue. He has smiled his way through a soap commercial in which the skin was literally rubbed off of his chest, and on late-night talk shows he’s bantered with Colbert and Corden, taken a turn at the piano, and let himself be pelted by a barrage of real basketballs and large hunks of cake disguised as basketballs tossed from the top of a high building by an NBA shooting guard.

But about that chimp.

The tender moment came about in an episode of Quantum Leap, the beloved sci-fi series—now a cult classic—in which Bakula’s character landed in the body of a chimpanzee during the early experimental days of the NASA space program. When not spinning around in dizzying circles, his character spent most of his time in a cage, fending off the advances of the girl next door.