Why did Emily Wickersham leave NCIS? For 3 years she said nothing — then she sat down with Tony and Ziva
Emily Wickersham left NCIS in 2021 without explaining why, and didn't take another role. The answer finally came on a podcast hosted by two former castmates — and it wasn't the one fans had settled on.
She joined in November 2013 on a three-episode arc and stayed for 172. Then she posted a photo, thanked everyone, and disappeared from screens entirely.
Fans filled in the gap themselves, and the theory that stuck was the obvious one: Wickersham announced a pregnancy shortly after her exit, so the pregnancy must have been the reason. She let that sit for three years before correcting it, and the correction came in a strange setting — a rewatch podcast hosted by Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, the two actors whose departures had defined the era before hers.
What she told Weatherly and de Pablo
On Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch in 2024, Wickersham laid out the sequence, and the order matters.
"I was ready to leave the show. It was time, and I was ready to move on to something else, and I guess this was the something else I was meant to move on to. So it was good."
The decision came first. The pregnancy came after.
"It took a while. I left the show, I found out I was pregnant a month later. So it was a combo of decompressing and trying to really relax and figure out how things were going to be without work. Because as you guys know, it's all consuming."
She described the period as "wonderful and weird." There was no dispute, no contract standoff, and no falling out — she was tired of an eight-season schedule and had decided to stop.
How the show wrote her out
Bishop's exit in the season 18 finale, "Rule 91," is one of the more elaborate in the show's history. To go undercover with CIA operative Odette Malone, she has to destroy her own reputation, so she confesses to leaking NSA documents and gets herself fired. She kisses Nick Torres on her way out the door, which the show had been building toward for years and then simply stopped.
Her Instagram farewell in May 2021 was more direct than anything she said on screen:
"Hanging this hat and jacket up. What a great ride it's been. This business is finicky and weird and consistency is a rarity. A moment in time I surely won't forget. Time goes fast. Eat it up but chew slowly."
Away from the show, she and husband James Badge Dale had son Cassius in December 2021 and a second son, Zephyr, in October 2024. She took no acting work in between.
The return, five years later
Bishop reappeared in the last shot of the NCIS season 23 fall finale, "Heaven and Nature," on December 16, 2025 — watching her old team from a parked car at a cemetery, having just been named Jessica Knight's first target for the new NCIS: Elite unit. The agent who replaced Bishop on the team was now hunting her.
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The payoff came in "Her" on March 3, 2026, with Bishop's hacker crew accused of leaking classified material and Bishop asking her former colleagues to clear her. Torres finally got to ask why she left.
Showrunner Steven D. Binder told TVLine the idea had been in the pitch since the start of the season, and that the logistics were the hard part: "She lives, you know, not here anymore, so that makes it difficult. But she was game." He also ruled out a longer arc — "We have no official plans right now to continue that storyline. So she's sort of back on the roster, so to speak."
Wickersham's own read, to TV Insider in February 2026, was less final: "The door's open. I love it there." On how the comeback happened, she was blunter — "They just asked me back."
Earlier we wrote: Guy Gardner enters Lanterns episode 6 as John Stewart probes Hal Jordan's death