Second Impression

Hudson Morgan

Tags: NCIS

Photography by Cliff Lipson
Styling by Angelique O”Neil

 

 

 

NCIS star Pauley Perrette brings new life to Impressionist masterpieces at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris

For someone so often confused with her goth-ish TV alter ego, Abby Sciuto, Pauley Perrette suddenly looks nothing like her.

Smoldering in an evening gown on the roof of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris with the sun setting over the Eiffel Tower, the star of NCIS has shed all vestiges of lab rat Abby. “Are you loving the roof deck a little bit?” she asks the photo crew assembled to capture the moment. She swigs from a bottle of beer and smiles widely. “One, two, three—fromage!”

Knowing the French word for cheese: Not bad for a Paris virgin. This is Perrette’s first time in the City of Lights, and it wasn’t an easy journey for the heroine-by-day, hermit-by-night. Despite the fact that she’s lived in Georgia, North Carolina, New York and all points in between, she has recently found herself frumping out in Los Angeles. “There have been years of being a total recluse,” she says over lunch in the hotel’s Galerie des Gobelins. “Wherever I am, I just want to be back at my house, on the couch. But sometimes things that you’re scared of—like traveling—all you gotta do is do ’em and they’re not so scary anymore.”

Especially when the destination is a luxe penthouse on Avenue Montaigne. Perrette, bless her, is staying in the Athénée’s Terrace Eiffel suite, which has a view so unadulterated you wonder if the landmark was built solely for that hotel room. “Sitting in my bed and looking at that is crazy,” she says. “Like, ‘Wow, look, that’s the … we’re in Paris!’ I didn’t want to leave home, and now I don’t want to leave Paris.”

But rather than worship at the altars of materialism (Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès) like most first-timers, Perrette opted for actual altars. “I already church-hopped a couple of churches around here,” she says. “That’s what I would do if I had another day: hit every church in Paris. All of them. It’s a lot of candle lighting! But especially in Paris, it’s a very peaceful place to be.”

Of course, spiritual sojourns aside, a couple of things have gotten lost in translation. While taking a shower this morning, Perrette managed to put three different mystery lotions in her hair before realizing that none of them was conditioner. (Full disclosure: Fromage is one of only three words in her French lexicon.) “I keep trying to speak Spanish to people but it doesn’t make any sense,” she admits, “and then all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Grazie!’ That’s Italian! Maybe I’ll go back to Alabama, where everyone speaks redneck.”

The more Perrette talks, the more her resemblance to Abby (or Abby’s resemblance to her) reemerges: long sentences, short attention span. But it’s hardly enough to justify the endless comparisons to her fictional counterpart. “Everyone calls me Abby, including my dad!” says Perrette. “And everybody asks me if I’m like her. I always go, ‘No.’ And then they say, ‘You have tattoos.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, everyone has tattoos, don’t they?’ ” She laughs—a warm, raspy rat-a-tat that bounces off the walls and fills the room—and it’s easy to see why she recently landed a Q Score (a market research term for likability) just behind Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman. Which means what, exactly? Even if she’s not as famous as they, those who do know her, like her.

And of those who like her, some of them love her. A lot. “There are people out there who have me tattooed all over them,” says Perrette, raising her eyebrows. “Me as Abby. Let’s just say there are a lot of Abby tattoos out there.” Perrette is grateful for the attention, but as important as the role is for her, she insists she’s still an ink-stained wretch at heart. “I’ve been a poet since I was young—that’s my thing,” she says. “But I also realized when I was young that you can’t be a poet. Nobody buys poetry and, like, hangs it on their wall. You gotta be something else, and then you can go back to it later.”

For now Perrette has to go back to vamping her way through the French impressionist photo shoot around the hotel, which actually isn’t so different from her day job. “It’s the same thing as being an actor,” she says. “You get the clothes and then you can just escape—which is the drug of being an actor—because you don’t have to be yourself.” She unfurls another signature laugh. “It’s like a very polite form of suicide!” Death among the impressionists—maybe Abby’s rubbing off on her after all.

Get behind the scenes with Pauley Perrette and all of your favorite CBS stars like never before!

SUBSCRIBE NOW!!!

Follow CBS Watch! Magazine on Facebook!