Pauley Perrette has quit acting and said in a new interview that she’s in a different place now.

The NCIS alum left the CBS military police procedural in 2018 and quit acting after her sitcom Broke was canceled in 2020.

In an interview with Hello In Perrette magazine, she said she would “never” return to acting, adding: “I am not ungrateful for the benefits it has brought me.”

“But I’m a different person now and I want to be there for everything – the good, the bad and the painful,” she said. “I want to be myself all the time, and it takes a lot of courage to tell myself that, but it’s authentic to how I feel.”

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Perrette went on to play Abby Sciuto NCIS for 15 years and left the show in 2018. After starring in Broke Before CBS canceled her, Perrette spent a season focused on producing documentaries, including the 2023 one Studio One foreverabout an LGBT nightclub in West Hollywood, California.

“At this point in my life I feel a deep need to find authenticity in everything and being an actor, especially at certain points in my life, has been a great escape; It’s like a drug because I didn’t have to be myself, I could be someone else. “My character didn’t have all the problems that I had,” Perrette said Hello.

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