‘NCIS’ star, Sean Murray, reveals that his stepsister, Troian Bellisario, had a crush on his ‘Hocus Pocus’ character, Thackery Binx, as a child

‘NCIS’ star Sean Murray reveals that his stepsister, Troian Bellisario, had a crush on his ‘Hocus Pocus’ character, Thackery Binx, as a child:

“[Bellisario] was acting a little weird around me when she first knew me […] She then told me years later it was because when she was a kid, she had seen Hocus Pocus and had a crush on me and she was trying to work that out.”

Sean Murray may be a constant presence on the nation’s televisions thanks to his starring role on CBS’s NCIS, but 10 years before he made his 2003 debut as NCIS Special Agent Timothy McGee, he was stealing preteen hearts in a little movie called Hocus Pocus.

EW caught up with Murray to mark NCIS’s 450th episode and asked him to dish about his status as a ghost hottie and his thoughts on the 2022 sequel, which saw the return of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy’s centuries-old witches to plague Salem, Mass.

Murray, 45, played Thackery Binx, the human boy who’s turned into an immortal black cat by the Sanderson sisters, and he’s amused by his status as the first crush for a specific segment of elderly millennials.

One of those times was when his mother, Vivienne Murray, married producer and screenwriter Donald P. Bellisario in 1998. When Murray met Donald’s children, one of them was already familiar with his work.

“Troian Bellisario, who became my stepsister after a certain point, was acting a little weird around me when she first knew me,” Murray said. “She then told me years later it was because when she was a kid, she had seen Hocus Pocus and had a crush on me and she was trying to work that out.”

Bellisario, known for her role as Spencer in Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars, was 8 years old when Hocus Pocus was released in 1993