Sophomore actress lands role in ‘NCIS’ as a Taliban sniper

Sophomore Nina Nelson shook with nervousness as she walked into her first audition to face the casting directors for the prime-time television show “NCIS.” Nelson’s lines in the Arabic language Pashto, which she had translated herself earlier that day, floated around in her head. She knew she was competing with others who had an Afghan background, whereas she had no experience with Afghan culture or speaking Pashto.

On Feb. 4, Nelson, who is well known as a talented singer and winner of the Saratoga Idol competition as a freshman, auditioned for the role of Khathira, a 15-year-old sniper who is forced to take up arms for the Taliban, on an “NCIS” episode. The audition was at Paramount Studios, and she received the role the day after. The episode aired on April 1.

“I am racially ambiguous, so it’s really easy to make me look like a certain race, but I wanted to pull it off a little more, so I put a [head dress] on, because it’s always good to show more effort,” said Nelson, whose heritage is a mix of Filipino, multiple European ethnicities, Chinese, Spanish and Scandinavian.  

Nelson’s part has five lines, all in Pashto.

“They gave me the lines in English on the day of the audition, and I had to figure out how to say it in Arabic,” Nelson said.

She said that Google Translate did not help her much, so she had to figure out how to translate Pashto on her own.

After the first audition, which went well, she was invited to the producer’s session later that day.

“There were these young girls who were actually Afghani, and I thought I didn’t have a chance,” Nelson said.

Fortunately for her, before she walked into the second audition, one of the producers told her to show emotion when she performed her lines, because none of the other girls had done so previously.

“I thought I had this advantage, and I wasn’t sure if it was fair or not, but I used it,” Nelson said.

The producers then asked Nelson if she would be willing to cut her hair and take off her braces if she got the role, and she agreed.

“Usually when you feel really good about an audition like that, you expect to get the call at least 24 hours later, but I didn’t and I was really scared,” Nelson said. “[Turns out,] my dad was just hiding it from me, because I had a chemistry test the next day.”

Nelson went to a table read at Paramount Studios on Feb. 10, where she got to meet the whole cast of the show, including actors Chris O’Donnell, LL COOL J, Barrett Foa and actresses Linda Hunt and Daniela Ruah.

“I had an assigned seat with my character’s name and my name as an actress,” Nelson said. “It was amazing.”

When she arrived on the set of the episode, which was in Santa Clarita in Southern California, she was introduced to the writer and first time director of the show, Frank Military, who said to Nelson that, “It had to be you; there was no other choice.”

“The filming was a lot more intense than anything I had ever experienced, and I learned a lot in the span of three days of filming,” Nelson said. “Saying your lines in rough terrain like that doesn’t seem like a lot of work, but by the end I was extremely exhausted.”

The weather conditions on set and her Taliban costume did not help either.

“It would start at around 48 degrees in the morning and 88 degrees in the afternoon, and I was wearing three layers of clothing and head scarf,” Nelson said.

As her first time performing in a prime-time television show, Nelson said she felt a little out of her comfort zone, but used this opportunity as a learning experience to better understand how the entertainment business works.

In addition to landing this role, Nelson has played supporting roles in two movies, a holiday-themed film called “A Christmas Wedding Date,” which came out in 2012, and another called “In the Doghouse,” which will come out later this year.

Nelson flies to Los Angeles one to four times a month to audition for different TV shows, commercials and movies. She has been auditioning since she was 8, but her career started picking up in eighth grade.

“It was interesting to see how literally putting your whole self in someone else’s shoes teaches you about different perspectives of life, and from the age of 7-8 when I started to see that, I told myself I never wanted to stop,” Nelson said.