Sean Murray’s Timothy McGee has come a long way since he was introduced in the sixth episode of NCIS. Originally a guest star in eight Season 1 episodes, he was upgraded to the main cast in Season 2, and following the departure of Mark Harmon, he now gets top billing in the opening credits and is officially the longest-serving NCIS cast member. Obviously Murray enjoys playing McGee given how long he’s stayed on the show, but the actor has addressed a permanent injury he suffered while filming NCIS, and honestly, that scene probably wasn’t worth it given what happened to him.
In the NCIS Season 2 episode “Bikini Wax,” McGee chased a suspect through a car wash, only for Gibbs to catch the guy on the other side, completely dry while the “probie” was covered in soap suds. It was a good lesson for McGee on how to anticipate when out in the field, but what wasn’t shown in the episode was Sean Murray taken a major tumble in that car wash. He stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to chat with his former co-stars Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, and when the former brought up the car wash scene, Murray recalled:
Running through that car wash, which I did many times and was a real car wash, I remember taking a sharp right... My dress shoes come out right from under me 'cause I'm sprinting. I come down on my right hand. And you know, like a lot of us actor types, we jump up, we just keep doing our thing. We don't even really notice what we do until afterwards. To this day, I have very limited mobility in my right thumb now. It's a good thing I'm a lefty.
I know procedurals like NCIS have to find interesting ways to spice up chase scenes, but considering it’s been almost 20 years since Sean Murray’s thumb was permanently damaged while shooting “Bikini Wax,” maybe it would have been better to skip the car wash. Or at the very least, couldn’t the actor have worn shoes with treads to reduce the chances of him slipping? It’s not like we needed to see his feet while he was roaming around in the car wash itself, so maybe some good sneakers rather than dress shoes would have made a big difference.
In any case, it’s a shame that Murray’s right thumb doesn’t function as well as it used to, but at least he landed on his hand rather than his head when he slipped. As far as how Timothy McGee is doing these days, besides his right thumb presumably working just fine, he got to reunite with Tony DiNozzo at the end of “The Stories We Leave Behind,” a.k.a. Season 21’s tribute episode to the late David McCallum. He also learned in “The Plan” that he had a half-sister and eventually met her, though it’s hard to say if we’ll ever see the two together onscreen.
NCIS Season 22 will premiere sometime this fall on the 2024 TV schedule alongside the franchise’s new prequel series, NCIS: Origins. There’s also the NCIS: Tony & Ziva spinoff coming up that will stream exclusively to people with a Paramount+ subscription, which you can use to stream all the other NCIS shows.
