Twenty one seasons in, and NCIS can still come up with surprises for its characters—and the actors as well! Take, for instance, the March 25 episode, in which McGee (Sean Murray) learns about a close relative he was unaware of thanks to DNA results.
“I was surprised to find that one out, too,” Murray tells TV Insider. Something tells us it’s the last thing McGee expects when his wife, Delilah (Margo Harshman), starts him on the path.
“Delilah is trying to force him to get into a genealogy, track your ancestors down kind of thing, and McGee is sort of anti that at the beginning because he thinks it’s ridiculous,” previews Murray. “And then as soon as he starts, he finds out that he’s got a long-lost relative somewhere, and that freaks him out pretty good. But he goes down that rabbit hole.”
Speaking of relatives, what are the chances of seeing Troian Bellisario pop up as McGee’s sister Sarah again? “It’s really funny that you mentioned that because while I don’t know whether that will happen, I did have lunch with Troian, my stepsister, a couple days ago, and we were talking about some of that stuff,” Murray shares. “Who knows what may happen? We don’t know.”
What you can expect from McGee in the remainder of the 10-episode “character-driven” season is some lighter stuff. For one, Delilah wants him to shave his goatee. “McGee is very against [it], so she ends up creating this online poll for his coworkers to all decide to weigh in on whether McGee has to shave his goatee or not. And he’s campaigning at work for people to vote the right way,” Murray says. “It’s actually a lot of fun. We had fun with it.”
Also coming up for the couple is some stuff at home. “McGee and his wife have lived in Tony’s [Michael Weatherly] old apartment—with a couple bodies under the floor, we found out over the years—so it would make sense that with all that, Delilah says, ‘You know what? Let’s talk about maybe flipping this place and remodeling this apartment a little bit,’” Murray continues. “We’re going to get into a little bit of HGTV, trying to remodel and renovate the apartment, and that’ll be fun.”
Like us, he’s a fan of that couple and what that brings to the screen. “It’s sort of a nice little break from our regular stuff, and as much as I love our regular stuff, it’s cool to kind of branch off and do a little family story at the same time. I love when we do that. Plus, Margo, who plays Delilah, is terrific. She’s great.”
With the show in its 21st season, the franchise soon reaching its 1,000th episode, and Murray part of it from Season 1, it’s impossible not to reflect on how far he’s come, from probie to a senior member of the team. Murray has been a fan of that growth as well, which we continue to see with each season.
“What’s nice is that we’ve seen a progression with McGee over the years as he started off as this bumbling rookie, and as he’s come up, he has learned from Gibbs [Mark Harmon], from the rest of the team,” he notes. “He’s become a really terrific agent in the field and particularly good at interrogations, in my opinion. He’s always growing, and there’s always that sense of in the shows that we do that that is a continuing thing. And I remember saying early on to our writers and showrunners that McGee cannot be baby Maggie Simpson. He cannot revert to the same character every week without growing. We can’t have that. And they were very quick to want to do the same thing as far as they didn’t want a baby Maggie Simpson either, where they wanted the character to grow along with the show. So that’s happened, and we’ve seen him come into his own quite a bit.”