The experience of working on a show for 22 seasons is not something Sean Murray takes for granted. “It’s incredibly rare,” he says, “and I’m very thankful. It’s not lost on me.”
On NCIS, Murray plays Special Agent Timothy McGee. He was first introduced as a guest star in season one and has gone on to become the show’s longest running cast member.
“I was looking at some of these photos and I’m just thinking about how much I’ve been there over two decades, and so there’s always an nostalgic aspect to everything and I’m really proud of us,” he says. “We’ve gone 22 years and the world of television has changed quite a bit and in some respects we’re a dinosaur, but we’re still got our fan base. We’re doing quite well!”
Murray is speaking to T&C after wrapping season 22 (the finale, “Nexus,” airs Monday, May 5), and started to prepare for season 23. “We all care very much, which is not always the case out there,” he says. “A lot of people like to rest on their laurels. I think we’re always pushing to do good work and as long as we’re doing that, then I’m having fun.”
Here, Murray takes T&C to the set of NCIS:
“I’m proud of us that we are always trying to make it better and make good episodes. I really mean that,” Murray says of NCIS’s longevity. “I’m not just saying that—because if we weren’t doing that, I’d be bored. I wouldn’t want to do it. It’s not just a job, it really keeps me really interested and I love the people that I work with.”
“We had the same trailers for the first 10 years—I think they were from the ’70s! They had wood paneling and shag carpeting. In the last years, they they did improve—there’s a fake fireplace thing, I bought a little rug. I’d never personalized it before.”
He continues, “But we’re not a bunch that spends a lot of time on our trailer, just because of the way we shoot. We don’t have a lot of downtime; in a typical day, I’m in my trailer in the morning getting changed, maybe 15 minutes, 20 at the most. The other time, I’m on the stages. I’m in hair and makeup, I’m in the DR room at lunch. Six hours later, I’m in there for 30 minutes maybe.”
“Hair and makeup is where everyone gets social and runs the scenes [while we] try and wake up and get our lines down and all that fun stuff,” he says. “The people that we’ve been working with in hair and makeup we’ve been with for a very long time.”
In this photo, “I’m holding blue script pages, and that was because there was a revision on a scene that I wasn’t aware of—that’s why it was blue pages. We’re frequently cramming some revised dialogue in hair and makeup.”
The show’s MTAC room (which stands for Multiple Threat Alert Center) doubles as actor holding. “We’re all hanging out in MTAC between shots, running our lines; I’d say 95% of the time we’re in there running lines and just doing the last minute little things, makeup touches, and getting our wardrobe for the scene, stuff like that.”
Of playing the same character for 22 seasons, he says, “I have a pretty good idea of the line between McGee and myself. But that’s not to say that there aren’t any similarities; as you grow with a character, you start to integrate parts of yourself into these characters. McGee’s father is a Navy captain, my father is a Navy captain—things like that become inspire and can inform some of that stuff. But at the same time, let’s say I’m reading a new script, if something is off, if the dialogue isn’t right the way the phrasing is, or something just doesn’t ring correctly in terms of it being true to McGee, I see it right away and [know] we’ve got to fix it right away. That’s just probably from that character for such a long time.”
McGee’s desk has moved throughout the bullpen multiple times over the course of the run, but one thing that’s stayed the same: a collection of Post Its that Murray has collected over the years. “There’s a stack of little Post-It notes on McGee’s desk that are little cheat notes that various actors have used in the squad room over the years,” he says. “Little hints, not full dialogue, but just little hints, little names, little just that things on computers and whatnot.”
He adds, “That’s probably the last 12 years of different things I’ve collected from different actors we’ve had on the show, people that have been on the show a long time.”
Murray and co-star Diona Reasonover, who plays Kasie Hines. “I love the people I work with and I know what a good place it is. I really do,” he says. “A number of the actors are very involved in the show. I’m not making it sound like we write everything that our characters do—it’s nothing like that. But we care a lot and we’ve been there a long time, so we kind of know the way certain things gel and great ideas can come from anyone in the company.”
“Even though we’ve been around 22 years, the show has gone through different iterations, it has felt like different shoes in one It’s not just the cast changes over the years. The show, the style has changed and evolved as we’ve gone on,” he says. “If you watch early episodes of this show, it’s very different than some of the episodes that we do now. We’re never just trying to be like, ‘Okay, well we did this. Let’s do this thing again.’ We care.”
“I get slightly bummed out when we’re not working because I miss everyone a little bit. We have a company of 100+ people—and also it’s not like how a lot of shows have different crew turnover. We’ve had 75% of our people have been with us since the show started.”
“In the last couple episodes of this season, the last three, four episodes, my character actually goes through some really fun different stuff that I’d never done on the show in 21 years previous.”
“I’ve lived in L.A. a long time and I remember doing the Universal Studios backlot tours—and my early auditions at Warner Brothers where I got to be on these back lots and see all this amazing stuff. I’m actually really proud of this: Over the last 10 years, we’ve built our own back lots, which you can see in this picture—it’s pretty impressive, it’s around two blocks.”
“There’s a real comfort that a lot of people have being able to check in with their group of people,” Murray says of the appeal of NCIS. “And usually you’ve got a story that is contained inside of an episode that you can have fun with. You don’t always have to watch the previous seven episodes to be able to get into it. You can jump into it.”
Over 22 seasons, Murray says, he learned some invaluable lessons—including from Mark Harmon, who played the show’s lead, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, from season one through 19.
“When you’re doing 20 to 24 episodes a year of one hour television, you’re shooting nine to 10 months a year,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to pace yourself. There’s an art to it—there’s knowing when to ramp it up and be a hundred percent and really push it, and there’s times to know when you just lay off it a little bit.”
