TV's MacGyver Walks Into An Escape Room...

...and walks out 45 minutes later with 5 minutes to spare

By Jean Bentley Sep 23, 2016 8:31 PMTags
MacGyver, Lucas TillCBS

If you're ever stuck somewhere—the wheel well of an airplane, a room where you have to solve puzzles in an hour to "escape"—Lucas Till, a.k.a. TV's new MacGyver, is your man.

The 26-year-old actor stars on CBS's updated remake of the classic television show, and, as it turns out, is a man you definitely want on your team the next time you're getting a group together to do an escape room.

The night before the show's premiere, Till, his costars George Eads and Justin Hires, and a group of journalists took on what was Till's (and nearly everyone's) very first escape room, the teambuilding activity that puts groups of people in a "locked" room with a time limit to solve the puzzles inside in order to "escape." (Quotes because the legality of actually doing those things is questionable.)

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The escape room premise itself is silly—sometimes you're trying to cure a zombie outbreak, ours involved a ghost trapped in a theater who needed exorcising before we could leave—but we threw ourselves into it, figuring out puzzles based on Shakespeare's plays, setting a "stage" to find hidden messages.

Till is a natural problem-solver, and despite the fact that none of the challenges involved fashioning explosives out of chewing gum and paper clips or any of MacGyver's trademark moves, managed to lead us to victory (or, rather, "escape") with more than five minutes to spare in our 50-minute time limit.

It makes sense, then, that Till does many of his own stunts in the new CBS series. The more he can do, the more believable it'll be.

"You do need to be protected, but at the same time, I love getting in there and doing it because it looks better when you can see the guy doing it," he told reporters at the show's 2016 Television Critics Association summer press tour panel. Like the time he convinced director James Wan to let him "get rock bottomed."

As Till tells it, "I convinced him to let this 250 pound man slam me into the ground, and all in one take, he picks me up, chokes me, slams me into the ground. That's just one of many things that we do on MacGyver."

Luckily the escape room required no physical violence, but good to know he could've helped escape that, too.

MacGyver premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on CBS.