Not even the Sanderson Sisters could have brewed up this story.
While Sean Murray has spent two decades solving crimes on NCIS, he first charmed audiences as a teen in the role of the cursed Thackery Binx in the Halloween classic Hocus Pocus. But as the actor revealed, among those taken by his performance was Pretty Little Liars star and his future stepsister Troian Bellisario.
"Troian Bellisario, who became my stepsister after a certain point, was acting a little weird around me when she first knew me," Sean—whose mom Vivienne Murray married Troian's dad, TV producer Donald P. Bellisario, in 1998—recalled to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Feb. 27 "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."
And Troian, who was 8 years old when the film premiered in 1993, isn't alone in loving the movie, which has since gone on to become a Halloween staple and even spawned a sequel in 2022, with Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy reprising their witchy roles.
In fact, Sean said he never could have predicted the film would still be beloved by so many.
"At the time, we were just doing our thing," he added. "We didn't know what it would become. It was a bomb when it was first released."
And even though he didn't appear in the sequel, he said he understood the decision to leave him and some of his former co-stars—like Thora Birch (Dani), Omri Katz (Max), Vinessa Shaw (Allison) and Amanda Shepherd (Emily)—out of it.
"To me, Hocus Pocus is really about those three women, those three witches," Sean explained. "It actually makes total sense to me that you would have a newer group with the witches and not necessarily from the original group. You know, we're all old and wrinkled now. Who wants to see us?"
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