According to Entertainment Weekly, a 2013 episode of “NCIS” explored the origins of Abby Sciuto’s interest in forensic science through flashback scenes of her as a young child.
If the actor who played Brighton Sharbino, the younger version of Pauley Perrette’s character, looked familiar, it’s because she also played the creepy, zombie-loving child Lizzie Samuels on “The Walking D3ad.”
Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) tells Lizzie to “just look at the flowers” before shooting the dangerous little girl in one of the show’s most emotional scenes.
While Sharbino began acting at a young age, Perrette took a little longer to discover her true calling. She revealed on Twitter that she started modeling at the age of two, but it wasn’t until she was in college in New York — where she was studying cr1m1nal science — that she decided to pursue acting as a career.
“I overheard a girl say she made $3,000 shooting a commercial,” she told CBS 42. As luck would have it, someone else told her about a director who was likely to hire her, and she landed more than a dozen jobs from her first audition alone, according to WANE 15.
Perrette told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that as a child, she used to read “science textbooks” for fun, so she’d been preparing for her “NCIS” role for years by the time she got it.