“I am just some redneck from Alabama. I don’t know how this happened!” Pauley Perrette told CBS 42 of her “NCIS” gig. But she’s explained exactly how she ended up in Abby Sciuto’s platform boots. Growing up, she sharpened her mind by reading textbooks in her free time, she told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “My obsession with crime came from a basic question that I started thinking about when I was around 13 years old,” she told Gluten Free & More, elaborating that she began pondering “the fact that humans can make life so much harder for others by committing a crime.”
Perrette attended college at Valdosta State University in Georgia. “All I did was study and study and study,” she told The Bonfire. (Sounds like Abby’s Caf-Pow would have come in handy!) She actually planned on pursuing a career in criminal science and moved to New York to get her master’s degree at John Jay School of Criminal Science. But fate — and a need of funds — intervened.
As she recalled to AP, she was “bartending in the club-kids scene, with a bra and combat boots and a white Mohawk” to make ends meet when she learned about a lucrative gig. “I had overheard a girl say she had made $3,000 shooting a commercial,” Perrette recalled to CBS News. So, when a co-worker told her about a director who might hire her, she jumped at the chance to audition.