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NCIS made Michael Weatherly a very recognizable name in the entertainment industry. But fame was a concept he wasn’t really affected by when he lived in an area with celebrities more famous than him.

Weatherly hardly felt famous residing in the city of Los Angeles. Although he was on one of the country’s most popular shows, his fame paled in comparison to other more popular celebrities. And these were megastars that Weatherly crossed paths with everyday.

“I guess, living in Los Angeles, you become so inured to the whole concept of fame because you’re at the traffic light and there’s Simon Cowell or you drive past Paris Hilton getting a traffic ticket. It’s commonplace when you’re in this town, so I have become slightly numb to it. In Los Angeles, nobody really cares if you’re on a show that they like or they’ve seen,” Weatherly once told Cult TV.

But depending on the area, Weatherly could sometimes find himself more popular in regions outside of Los Angeles and even beyond the country. When he visited France, for instance, he was surprised by how popular NCIS was over there. And because of the show’s fame, Weatherly received the kind of attention in France that was missing from Los Angeles.

“It was like being in a parallel dimension,” Weatherly said about his trip to Paris. “We were going around and taking pictures, and then all of a sudden, a group of tourists recognized me. I found myself constantly reminded by the French how much they love the show, which is ironic because the French aren’t really known for their love of American culture, particularly American military themes.” Weatherly’s NCIS connections also allowed the actor to enjoy special treatment during his stay.

“I was definitely treated to the kind of hotel experience that is not normal to my travels,” he said. “It wasn’t a youth hostel… Also, seeing all the monuments, having dinner at Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, eating lunch at Grand Colbert, walking down the Champs-Elysées, sampling wine at the Caves Bernard Magrez, going to the Hermès shop and getting amazing service because all the employees were really big fans of NCIS.

NCIS took some time before it found some momentum. The show’s star Mark Harmon recalled that NCIS didn’t fair well in its earlier years, as it still hadn’t found its identity.

“We were able to keep it afloat a couple of years because we weren’t good enough to get all the attention and we weren’t bad enough to get canceled,” Harmon once told The Seattle Times. “And the biggest thing: We shoot in Santa Clarita. Nobody from the network wanted to drive out there!”

The series would eventually pick up steam around season 3 before becoming the ratings juggernaut it turned into. But although the show started to understand what it was, it took some time for its network to recognize NCIS’s unique identity. At least according to Weatherly. The actor felt CBS only realized what the show was in season 7 after watching a commercial for the episode “Truth or Consequences.”

“I was under the truth serum,” Weatherly said on the podcast Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch. “I knew that I was scared to death… but I also knew that Gibbs was somewhere, that I knew I had the angel somewhere. So I had the confidence of somebody who’s like, ‘Do whatever you want to me. It’s not going to end well for you, but you do whatever you want.’ So at one point, he hit me and I said, ‘Can I get a glass of chardonnay? Because that would go so well with the taste of blood I have in my mouth’ or whatever. And they actually cut that into the commercial, the ad lib about asking for a glass of chardonnay.”

“I really felt that that was when the network knew what they had,” he said. “And they were cutting trailers for the next week’s episode, which I would geek out on as well, ’cause I would watch the cuts. ‘Cause in the beginning, I would be like, ‘These people don’t even watch the show.’ They’re cutting together these these trailers for next week. ‘On Navy NCIS, the team encounters a…. the crime is their battlefield.’ I’m like, ‘This is not the show.’”