The Criminal Minds Cast Went To Great Lengths To Pull This Wild Prank On Shemar Moore

"Criminal Minds" ran for 15 seasons on CBS and now its reboot, "Criminal Minds: Evolution" is set to premiere over the Thanksgiving holiday on Paramount+ (via Deadline). The show follows criminal profilers for the FBI who use behavioral analysis to catch a variety of perpetrators. The new episodes will stay true to current events, where the team will face a new foe who has apparently used the pandemic to team up with his fellow serial killers.

Yet, despite the show's dark subject matter, the cast seems to have quite a bit of fun on the set. One person who can certainly attest to this is Shemar Moore, who played Derek Morgan for 11 of the show's 15 seasons. Moore was notoriously the on-set target of several pranks the cast pulled on him. One DVD feature details how the cast and crew convinced him to wear green dots on his face to add CGI for his goatee. But it certainly didn't end there. "I think I had a big 'L' on my forehead, for being a loser, or an 'S' for 'stupid'...because I was the most gullible person in the world," he told TV Guide about his susceptibility to pranks. "They used to punk me with fake rats...we had a lot of fun," he elaborated.

And it wasn't just scary rodents either. The cast revealed on The Talk that Moore is also scared of bears, which set up a slightly more elaborate prank they would pull on the actor.

As the show's original run was coming to an end, some of the cast gathered with Entertainment Tonight for an interview, where they revealed one of their larger pranks on Shemar Moore. And this one didn't just involve some fake rats.

When asked about the wildest scenes they remember, Joe Mantegna remembered an episode involving a live bear and Moore, to which Matthew Gray Gubler revealed that the bear was actually an on-set prank and wasn't used for filming. "That was a practical joke actually ... we rented a bear just for the joke. It was in the woods, I remember," Gubler revealed. Kirsten Vangsness responded with surprise, thinking this whole time that it was a person in a bear costume and not actually a real animal. "That was a different prank," Gubler told her.

It certainly seems that Moore was the favorite when it came to on-set practical jokes. It was all in good fun, and Moore thinks highly of his fellow "Criminal Minds" co-stars. "[W]e all grew, we all evolved, we all got more confident. We all became a close-knit family," he told E! when he left the show in its 11th season. As we won't be seeing Moore in "Criminal Minds: Evolution," we will have to see if any other cast member takes Moore's place as the main target of pranks.