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Todd Lasance (Jim “JD” Dempsey)

Australian actor Todd Lasance, best known for his roles in Spartacus: War on the Demand, The Vampire Diaries, The Flash, Crownies and more, will also star in a lead role in the show. He plays Sergeant Jim “JD” Dempsey on NCIS: Sydney opposite Olivia Swann.

Lasance also took to Instagram to show his appreciation for the new role and the NCIS franchise as a whole. “Still can’t believe I actually get to post this!!!!! This feels so surreal. Already feels like family!” he said in the post. “The NCIS franchise is one of the biggest in the world, and I am genuinely honoured to be part of the first international reinterpretation of the show and at the same time playing an Australian in my own backyard! It’s rare you get to work with such a phenomenal cast, and we can’t wait to bring you all the crime drama, action and humour, all set on the world’s most beautiful harbour.”

Showrunner Morgan O’Neill told TV Insider in November 2023 about Mackey and JD’s history on NCIS: Sydney. “The office is run by Captain Michelle Mackey, who’s a former Marine Corps chopper pilot. She’s a hothead; she’s a maverick,” she said. “She’s very hard to work with. She’s been moved around NCIS a little bit while they try to find where she can do the least damage. But she’s incredibly good at what she does. She’s very instinctive in terms of the way she runs her investigations, but it means that she’s a really tough task master and she’s a real hard nut to crack. And so it makes it especially interesting to see how the 2IC, who’s an Australian Federal Police force sergeant, Jim Dempsey, gets to manage her because effectively he’s managing her for the rest of the team. In a funny way, it’s this kind of dance between the boss and the real boss. And it’s interesting, JD has to adjust the way he runs a squad to take into account the fact that he’s working for this maverick.”

She continnued, “And they clash a little bit at first, I won’t lie to you; as you’ll see in the first episode, they really do butt heads. As you can imagine, there’s a sense of pride at who has control of the situation, who runs the investigation, whose jurisdiction it is. The nature of NCIS is that there are a lot of crimes that kind of fall in that gray area between jurisdictions, and that’s where a lot of the fun is to be had in the episodes. So they come together like bulls initially, and what’s exciting is to see how they work through those problems.”

While JD and Mackey clash, the showrunner reminds viewers that the team of NCIS: Sydney, like other NCIS franchises, is a family. “As you would know, being a fan of the show, one of the key things about NCIS is that it’s really, at its heart, a family drama, and we have the opportunity, as I said, to create this first blended family within the history of the franchise,” she said. “We really have an opportunity to see these people coming together for the very first time. Because, unlike other iterations of the franchise where the audience drops into a group of people who already know each other, who already function as a team, we see them from day one and everything that entails and all the building of trust and sometimes the fracturing of trust and the testing of those bonds.”

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