George Eads from CSI Joins ‘MacGyver’ Reboot on CBS

The revival of the “MacGyver” series on CBS has enlisted CSI alum George Eads in the cast. The actor is going to be in the pilot as a conspiracy theorist, but the lead character has yet to be cast.

TV Line reports that Eads is going to play Lincoln, who works a a government employee. The show is still searching for a twenty-something actor to play the role of MacGyver. The series follows the 80s show that starred Richard Dean Anderson as MacGyver. He’s known for coming up with unconventional solutions that gets him out of sticky situations.

The show’s series creator, Lee David Zlotoff, is also on board the revival as producer with Paul Downs Colaizzo writing the script. But the MacGyver reboot has lots its pilot director, James Wan, due to a scheduling conflict.

“My initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right?” Wan said of revival, per Coming Soon. “I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a ‘North by Northwest’: He gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him,” he added. “He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of ‘Enemy of the State.’ So imagine ‘Enemy of the State’ if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.”