Sean Murray was 10, spending a week on an aircraft carrier, when he wandered somewhere he was not supposed to be.
He had flown to Hawaii to meet his father’s ship, the USS Enterprise, and stay on board for the trip back to Naval Air Station Alameda, outside San Francisco. At night he walked the hallways under the red lights, listening to what he later called “the dark hum, like in the movies.” He watched jets take off, one of them breaking the sound barrier over the ship. What really got him, though, was the McDonald’s. “I could not believe it,” he said. “I kept thinking ‘They have a McDonald’s!'”
Then he found the war room.
“I’m still not exactly sure what that is, but apparently it’s not a place that a 10-year-old should be,” he later told an interviewer. “I remember them paging my dad to have him come get me out of the war room.”
“Spending a week aboard an aircraft carrier as a 10-year-old was pretty wild.”
It was a Tiger Cruise, the kind of trip the Navy offers so families can see a little of that life. For Murray, it was just one piece of a childhood spent moving from base to base. He turns 49 this Sunday, November 15. Veterans Day has just passed, which is when he and his father, a retired Navy captain, usually get on the phone.
Fans know him as Timothy McGee, the quiet center of NCIS. He has been there since early in the first season, and McGee is now the longest-running character on the show. Before any of that, he was a Navy kid.
Quick answer: Sean Murray, who plays Timothy McGee on NCIS, was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital on November 15, 1977, and grew up on military bases around the world. His father, Craig Murray, is a retired Navy captain who served 30 years. When the show first needed a backstory for McGee, the producers asked Sean if he had pictures of himself with his dad. His father was in Navy whites, and that photograph helped make McGee’s TV father a Navy officer. On screen, McGee and the admiral had a hard, distant relationship. Off screen, Sean has said the opposite is true.
He Grew Up a Navy Kid
“I’m a naval brat. I was born in Bethesda Naval Hospital. I grew up on bases,” Murray has said. The family moved through posts in Australia, Singapore, London and several in California. “I was never in one place for more than two years,” he recalled.
He didn’t think of it as a loss. “I remember all kinds of positives for it. I remember very specifically being conscious of the chance to re-create yourself whenever we started someplace. So it was almost like it went toward an acting kind of nature.”
“I grew up on military bases,” he said in another interview. “My father is a retired 30-year Navy Captain.”
The separations were real. During the Gulf War, his father’s ship had just finished a deployment and was on its way home when the war started in Kuwait. The ship turned around and went back. Murray was at home, watching Saddam Hussein on television. “He was saying that the rivers would run red with the blood of American soldiers,” Murray said. “That was when everything hit me with what my dad does.”
The Photo That Made McGee’s Father a Navy Officer
Years later, when NCIS first visited McGee’s apartment, the crew needed a quick backstory and a few personal details for the set. They asked Murray if he had pictures of himself as a kid with his dad.
“I said, ‘yes, but he was a Navy officer and is in his navy whites,'” Murray told an interviewer in 2017. “They made McGee’s father a Navy officer. Part of the story evolved from a picture of me and my father while he was on a ship coming back from deployment.”
The picture itself went up in McGee’s apartment. “There’s a picture of me and my real father together in McGee’s apartment set,” he has said, “which is kind of cool and sort of inspired the rest of the character’s story.”
On Screen, They Never Got Along
On the show, McGee’s father was a four-star admiral, John McGee, played by Jamey Sheridan. He arrived in the 2013 episode “Squall” as a cold, imposing presence, already estranged from his son, and later revealed he was sick. In the December 16, 2014, episode “House Rules”, McGee spent Christmas writing him a letter. At the end of the hour, he slipped it into his father’s coffin.
That was never Sean’s story.
“On the show McGee and his father, before he passed, had a tough relationship. In real life it’s a very different story. I have a very close relationship with my father. We’re in no way estranged.”
He has put it even more simply: “Personally my father and I get along just fine. Actually quite well.”
His dad, he has said, thinks it’s pretty funny that his son ended up playing an agent who polices the military, after growing up a military brat. He also loves the show. “I’m pretty sure he would watch it whether I was on it or not.”
The military-family part of McGee’s life has always landed close to home for him. Filming the Season 13 episode “Homefront,” about a teenager used to having a parent deployed for months at a time, he said it brought up a lot of his own childhood. “People don’t understand. They always think about the person in service. And sometimes people don’t realize their family — that’s a whole thing to deal with.”
On Veterans Day, the two of them mark it in a quiet way: a long phone call. “It’s like tossing a baseball back and forth with your dad.”
This year the holiday came and went just before Murray turns 49, still playing the Navy captain’s son who grew up, stayed, and somehow ended up on a show that polices the Navy. Happy early birthday, Sean.
