My worst moment: ‘NCIS’ star Sean Murray explains he’s not a jock. Even if several shows have cast him that way

When he started out as an actor, Sean Murray never would have predicted a career with nearly two decades of job security playing Special Agent Timothy McGee for 18 seasons on the CBS drama “NCIS.”

“In this business, especially as an actor, that just does not happen very often,” Murray said. “Shows are not meant to go that long usually, so it is definitely a unique position to do one character and one job for 18 years. It’s wild.”

But it wouldn’t be half as fun unless the character evolved. “And we had those conversations right at the beginning,” he said. “McGee started out as this rookie agent but I remember saying, ‘I don’t want it to be like baby Maggie Simpson where every week you revert to the same character; there has to be growth.’ And I think that McGee has probably changed over time more so than any of the other characters on the show.”

When asked to share an embarrassing moment from his career, instead of focusing on one instance Murray recalled a series of indignities that stuck in his memory that are part of any actor’s life. For Murray, that career began when he was a teenager. “I couldn’t help but think of a few things off the top of my head,’ he said.

My worst moment ...

“Do you remember the TV show ‘Silk Stalkings’? I did a guest role on that (in 1995) and my character was supposed to be a basketball star and I could play just enough to where I could kind of fake it.

“So I was me with a bunch of guys who actually knew how to play ball. We’re mixing it up and they have the cameras going. And all of a sudden I was completely overcome and ran to the corner and started throwing up because I had physically exerted myself so much. Getting sick in front of all the guys? That was embarrassing. It was like, yeah, I’m not as physically fit as all of you and now I’m throwing up.

“I was a teenager during this time, which is an awkward age. You’re so self-conscious about everything to begin with, so the little things that go wrong so much bigger and really embarrassing.

“Before that I did a show called ‘Civil Wars’ (in 1992) with Mariel Hemingway where I was supposed to be a top-ranked young tennis star, which is funny because this was a situation not unlike ‘Silk Stalkings.’ The shot was set up so that I was supposed to just serve the ball and the other guy would miss it. We tried to do it about eight times and I couldn’t get it over the net. The other guy was a pro who was trying to make it look like he was missing the ball and the whole thing was so bad that they ended up having someone throw the ball over the net from off camera and then I ran in like I had just hit the ball.

“Basically these two stories point to the fact that I was not a major jock. They never asked if I could play tennis, they never asked if I could play basketball. In fact, the one role I did where they did ask if I could do something sports-wise involved skiing and I’m actually a pretty good skier, so I was able to do that. But I remember I was sent out to an audition to play a Swedish wrestler. I think I was 19? I was a pretty lanky kid and I walked into the room and the casting director looked at me and I looked at her, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure why I’m here either. I think there was a mistake.’ We actually laughed about it and we did the scene and she ended up bringing me in on another project months later that I ended up booking.

“But this stuff happens when you’re an adult, too. I’ll give you an ‘NCIS’ story. We were doing an episode that was a really heavy McGee episode and there was lots and lots of tech talk, which I’m actually good at because I know and understand a lot of it. But this was an episode where I just had mountains of dialogue in every scene and the pace of shooting television is just go, go, go, go. As soon as you finish a scene, you have to be ready to go on the next one and it might be four pages of dialogue.

“So I think it was the last day we were shooting the episode, I was doing a scene with Pauley Perrette in Abby’s lab and I had a monologue that was supposed to be very frustrated and rushed. And because of all the dialogue memorization I had done for this episode, my brain just hit a wall. I remember feeling panicked and looking at Pauley after rehearsal and saying, ‘I’m not going to remember a word of this. I can’t do this.’

“And Pauley just kind of smirked and she said, ‘Sean, we’ve all had that happen. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to take a piece of paper and write your monologue down and I want you to stick it on the computer in front of you and I want you to read it as if you’re saying it to me.’

“And I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Because that goes against everything that acting is about! But it became a matter of pure survival; you’re there to get things done.

“So I did it (laughs), I wrote down the monologue and I stuck it to the computer and I read the entire thing during the scene and I felt like the worst actor in the world.”

Has Murray watched the episodes in question when there was a calamity behind the scenes?

“Sometimes. I remember watching the ‘NCIS’ episode and I was so scared because I knew the scene was coming up and I was so nervous to see what was going to happen. And none of it looked fake in any way! I was like, wow, I guess I pulled it off.

“But I figured out pretty early on that I don’t learn a lot from watching myself. I can usually watch something without that cringey I’m-watching-myself feeling only if it’s years later, then I can sort of judge it properly.”

The takeaway …

“Well, we know that I’m not a jock (laughs). We’ve figured that out.

“It’s funny, even just talking with you now, the times when I had these embarrassing moments, it ended up being OK. Or sometimes turning into a positive. It feels terrible in the moment, but in the big picture it isn’t, and you learn from those things. It’s part of the adventure.”