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‘NCIS’ Star Sean Murray Reveals His Favorite McGee Nickname (and It’s Perfect)
Speaking with Collider ahead of NCIS’ milestone 500th episode, Sean Murray looked back on his decades-long run as Timothy McGee as part of our retrospective series, Collider Rewind. Originally introduced as a one-off guest character in Season 1, McGee quickly became a core part of the team, with Murray officially joining as a series regular in Season 2. Over the years, the character has grown from a socially awkward “probie” into one of the show’s most trusted agents — and one of its last remaining links to the early days of the series.
During our conversation, Murray reflected on how NCIS has managed to stay relevant for more than two decades, pointing to its character-driven storytelling and the deep connection audiences have built with the team over time. He also spoke about watching McGee evolve across the series, the organic moments that helped shape the show — from on-set improvisation to fan-favorite running gags — and what it’s been like to help guide new cast members as one of the show’s longest-tenured stars. Read on for the full conversation.
COLLIDER: With the 500th episode of NCIS, it’s now surpassing shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Family Guy, and even classics like Bonanza. Being on the show, what is it that you found to be the reason why the show has been such a mainstay for audiences around the world?
SEAN MURRAY: It’s a good question. We were something new when we started. I think the character-driven procedural, the walk-the-line of comedy and drama was sort of a new thing when we started. At least, that’s how I recall. We found our thing, and over the years, it’s continued. A lot of people have been a part of this world. We’ve been incredibly fortunate with the people that have passed through NCIS who were still there, who were a part of it, in front of the camera, behind the camera. We’ve actually got quite a few people on this production, 23 years later here, who grew up doing the show, that had done the show from the beginning, like in my case in front of the camera, but a lot of people behind the camera. Everyone is very protective over our thing.
I get asked this question a lot, obviously, and I never have a great answer for it. I can tell you that. I never do. Even when I try to think about something to say, it always kind of eludes me. But it’s a fun show, and it’s got great characters. There’s also the added thing of when you have characters who have been established and have years of history that you’ve seen, people become really invested in some of these characters, and they become like a family for a lot of people. There are people who have grown up with us, and all kinds of stuff. So, it’s pretty cool. It’s so fortunate, that’s for sure.
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How Sean Murray Became an ‘NCIS’ Star
And I’m one of those people. I’ve been a fan of NCIS since JAG and the backdoor pilot, and I remember you were on JAG as Danny Walden.
MURRAY: Oh, nice! That’s right.
What was the process for you coming from JAG into NCIS? Was it an audition process, or did they just love your performance in JAG and want to find a way to bring you into the new world?
MURRAY: Well, Don Bellisario, who ran JAG, I worked for a number of times and did a couple of episodes for him. My mother was actually married to Don, so that’s how I met Don.
I did not know that!
MURRAY: This is true. They got married when I was maybe in my early 20s. So, that’s how I met Don. Anyway, I did a couple of roles on JAG. I did Danny Walden, and I think I did a character who was an ensign in an earlier episode of JAG.
So actually, when NCIS was happening, the character of McGee was a one-shot guest star that was actually written and came up with by Frank Cardea and George Schenck, who were two of the writers over at NCIS. They created McGee in their script, who was, again, a one-time character. Anyway, we came, we did it. I think “Sub Rosa” was the name of the episode that was the fifth or sixth show in Season 1, and it was great. We had a really fun time together. It all gelled well. My character didn’t end up dead or in jail or something at the end. Anytime you do a guest star, you’re hopeful about that.
I remember feeling like we were onto something cool.
A couple of episodes later, if I recall, they were three minutes short on an edit on an episode, so they had to come up with some material to make up a C-story, and someone said, “Let’s bring back McGee, and we’ll put him with Tony. They were fun together, so we’ll have something with them, and we’ll do something there.” So McGee appeared once more, and this was a couple of episodes down the road there, and from that point on, McGee was just slowly a part of the thing and appeared more and more.
I remember we got to an episode, I think maybe, somewhere between [episodes] 18, 19, or 20 in Season 1, which I believe was called “Dead Man Talking,” and it was a stakeout episode. We were working on shifts, me and Tony, and Sasha Alexander’s character and [Mark] Harmon’s character, and I remember feeling like we were onto something cool. A lot of the initial things that informed a lot of the beats and tone of the show were starting to pop up. They were starting to show up, so we could feel it. There was something there. And then the characters being a little less one-dimensional, things were popping, and we could just feel something coming together. I just remember that episode specifically, “Dead Man Talking,” as a time when it’s like, “Okay, this is informing something that we’re doing.”
And then they brought you back for Season 2, and the rest was history.
MURRAY: Yeah, brought me back for Season 2. At the beginning of Season 2, I became a full-fledged member of the team, which was great. That was the early days of the original Probie.
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And now you’re kind of like the last of the “old guard” from that era of the show. What has it been like for you evolving and getting to be the face that newcomers look to for guidance on what it means to be part of NCIS?
MURRAY: It’s pretty cool. I haven’t gotten bored for two decades playing this character, and part of the reason is the characters have always been changing and evolving. That’s something we’ve always been conscious of doing from early on. Something that I would say to some of our writers early was that I didn’t want McGee to be like Baby Maggie Simpson and just revert to the same age every week. Him growing [up] was going to be part of the fun of that character, this very schooled, informed character who was extremely socially awkward and didn’t know how to handle a lot of things when it came to everything that comes with that job. The academic part of it, he had no problem, but everything else came over the years. Gibbs showed him how to run interrogations and things like that. He became a very good interrogator, McGee, and he just got better in the field and more confident.
As things went on, the different times when he finds himself in leadership roles, and different iterations of the team, I haven’t gotten bored. I’ve never felt like I’m doing the same old thing, which is nice. I don’t think any of us do. I don’t think any of us feel like we’re just hitting the light switch and then going, “Okay, here we are. I’m going to be Torres, and I’ll be McGee.” We’re always pushing for something to try and make it better.
The series has always been reinventing itself over the years with new team members, new cases. It’s always fresh, even for audiences. I was thinking about all of the nicknames that McGee’s had over the years, the McNicknames. I think of McGoo because people always call me Moogie, and it always gelled.
MURRAY: [Laughs] So that one rings true a little bit.
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Do you have any favorite ones that he’s been called?
MURRAY: Oh, I’ve got my favorite. I remember when [Michael] Weatherly came up with it, too. I think my favorite is probably Probie-Wan Kenobi.
That’s a good one.
MURRAY: Probie-Wan is pretty sweet. It kind of hits the mark just perfect.
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What are some of the stories over the years that have stood out to you from NCIS? Are there any that maybe fans have come up to you and talked with you about, or just ones that made you look at something differently, or still ring true for you?
MURRAY: It’s funny because, like you said, we’ve been going for a while with the show, but the show’s changed in so many ways, so I can watch some of the early episodes and be almost shocked by how much things have changed in different ways since. The rhythm of things, the rhythm of the edits, a lot of the character traits that evolved as it came along, as things grew.
McGee’s a fun character. He’s got these quirky little things. One of the storylines that comes up quite a bit with fans is his writing career, the Thom E. Gemcity stuff, and the Deep Six books, where he basically just rips off characters around him and barely renames them and publishes The Adventures of Rick Sorres and Co.
Would you like to see more from that storyline?
MURRAY: I love it! We’ve actually done a lot of these. And what’s cool is that we’ve actually gotten back into it lately. In this past season, we had a really fun episode — I think several into this year. I don’t recall the name of it, but we opened with McGee, and he was doing a reading of his book for fans, and he ends up getting drugged and kidnaped, and it starts a little adventure. But what was so much fun about that episode was we got to spend most of the episode with the characters in his head in his book, as played by our actors that the characters are based on. So, that was really fun. That was a really fun episode, and it was different, too, because we had characters appearing and not appearing. Sometimes we see them, sometimes we don’t. We plan, and sometimes we don’t. So that was kind of new for us, so that was cool. We did some fun, different things in that episode. I love the Thom E. Gemcity stuff.
You need some tie-in novels to get published.
MURRAY: Right? I’m sure we could come up with something. Yeah.
You need to get Paramount on the line to make that happen.
MURRAY: There you go. We’ll put out a series. [Laughs]
There you go! I had read somewhere in preparation for this, I think you broke your wrist filming a scene in an early season. Is that true?
MURRAY: Oh, that was my thumb. It actually was in the opening of the show for a while, where I think there was a car wash stunt. I go through a car wash. I remember Harmon and I filming a part of that sequence where I run through the car wash, and I had on the dress shoes, and I was running on wet, painted cement. We were doing a take, and my feet came out from under me, and I came down on my hand, and my thumb was not in the right position. To this day, I still have limited mobility in my right thumb.
Oh, no! I’m so sorry.
MURRAY: Oh, no. It’s all good. It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt. Hey, I finished the take, though! I jumped up and kept going.
That’s important. That’s your Aragorn breaking his toe in Lord of the Rings moment.
MURRAY: Hey, there you go. Or Leo cutting his hand on the glass in Django Unchained.
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Are there other moments like that, that you think back to, like, “Oh, that made the cut? That moment made the take, and something insane was happening in the midst of it?”
MURRAY: A lot of what I did with Weatherly was insane, I can tell you that. One of the reasons he and I worked well together was that I played his straight man a little bit. Michael was known to say anything except the written dialogue sometimes, so we would go on these adventures together, doing a little bit of ad-libbing, but we’d always come back to the written word, and then go back. I think about that sort of stuff. Why did I start talking about Weatherly in this silly thing? I’m sorry. It’s hard to not think about that when we go down memory lane.
I was rewatching some of those first seasons, and I was thinking, I wonder how much stuff ended up being ad-libbed once everybody got very comfortable with each other, being able to riff and stuff.
MURRAY: Oh, yeah! I remember doing an episode when Michael was just sort of getting on it. He was just figuring out his character and finding out what makes it happen, and he started doing this half-Bill Murray impression at some point in a scene. He was definitely doing his own thing, but inspired by, and I remember they printed the take and we were surprised that they printed it and moved on. Michael and I sat down in our chairs for a minute, and he’s like, “I hope I don’t get fired. I’ll be honest with you.” [Laughs] He was half joking, but I half serious, too, because that’s the way it is. But he was onto something, and we started having a lot of fun there together. That was an adventure with him, for sure. For sure.
Looking back to Season 1, and what we were talking about with how you joined the series, were there other moments throughout the run where some things started happening organically, and the writers started writing to it and developing these stories, like how you obviously were brought in and you kept staying there? Were there other moments like that, where the organicness of a series happened?
MURRAY: It’s hard to sometimes think of specific moments, but there are happy accidents that make this stuff up. Things inspire other things. Sometimes just a scene has given us an idea for a storyline. It’s hard for me, of course, to come up with right now a perfect example of it. I mean, the slapping on the head, that came out of a rehearsal that we did in the squad room with Harmon and Weatherly when Gibbs is trying to get Tony to say something. We were in rehearsal, and Michael was going up, just making a joke about something, so Mark, joking around and in character, gave him this kind of slap upside the back of the head, which, by the way, is something that Harmon worked on very well because he could do it to you without barely even touching you. He was very careful about not wanting to hurt anybody. But that came out of that rehearsal. I guess that’s something that someone had done to him when he was young, being a goofball.
Then that became a huge thing. For years, running around, Michael and I had to get used to people asking to slap us on the heads. So, there’s one right there. Now I’m remembering. Cote de Pablo, with Ziva, she would get her Americanisms wrong or phrases, and if I recall, some of that came out of Cote naturally.
I love that.
MURRAY: Which was great because she’s Chilean, and she would sometimes throw things that weren’t quite right, and that sort of started inspiring some of those Zivaisms.
What a fun character!
MURRAY: Oh my god, yeah.
My last question for you is, what do you think NCIS looks like in another 500 episodes?
MURRAY: Oh, Jesus, well, I’d look gray if I’m still there, if they still let me do my thing there. Wow. That’s a scary thought, another 500. It’s pretty cool, though. We’re proud that we’ve done this, that we’ve made it this far. It’s pretty neat to be up there in the statistics or however you want to say that. It’s just sort of a testament to the fans of the show that we’ve had this longevity and appealed to, luckily, a large amount of people for a long time, and I hope we just continue to do it. If we do another 500, that would be great.
New episodes of NCIS air Tuesdays on CBS and next-day on the Paramount+ app.
- Release Date
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September 23, 2003
- Showrunner
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Donald P. Bellisario
- Directors
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Dennis Smith, Terrence O’Hara, Tony Wharmby, James Whitmore Jr., Thomas J. Wright, Michael Zinberg, Arvin Brown, Rocky Carroll, Diana Valentine, Leslie Libman, Tawnia McKiernan, Colin Bucksey, William Webb, Bethany Rooney, Alrick Riley, Jeff Woolnough, Alan J. Levi, Lionel Coleman, Martha Mitchell, Peter Ellis, Michael Weatherly, Edward Ornelas, Stephen Cragg, Tom Wright
- Writers
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George Schenck, Frank Cardea, Jesse Stern, John C. Kelley, Jennifer Corbett, Christopher Silber, Reed Steiner, Nicole Mirante-Matthews, Jack Bernstein, Scott J. Jarrett, Matthew R. Jarrett, Kimberly-Rose Wolter, Don McGill, Gil Grant, Frank Military, Nell Scovell, Steven Kriozere, Brian Dietzen, Kate Torgovnick May, Jeff Vlaming, Sydney Mitchel, Katie White, Richard C. Arthur, Laurence Walsh
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Sean Murray
Timothy McGee
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david mccallum
Dr. Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard
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