‘Scorpion’ Secrets Spilled: Real-Life Walter O’Brien Gives Peek Inside the Firm in CBS’ Hit Drama

“It’s more on the keyboard than it is on a machine gun,” cyber-security expert tells TheWrap

Walter O’Brien is more than the lead character on the CBS show “Scorpion.”

The real-life O’Brien is the head of Scorpion Computer Services, and his exploits as an international cyber security expert are the inspiration for the hit TV series. The show has proven so successful it has had an enormous impact on O’Brien’s business.

“We used to get 70 hits a day on the website. We now get up to 104,000,” O’Brien told TheWrap. “We used to get a customer every three weeks. We now get three customers every hours. We used to find a genius about once every quarter. We now get about 20 resumes a day from kids with IQs over 150.”

Those applying to Scorpion no doubt have some dream of getting themselves onto the TV series, which is not as far fetched as it sounds.

“All the characters on the show are inspired by real people at the company,” O’Brien said. “All of their interactions with their high IQ and low EQ, and their sarcasm where they’re ribbing each other, sometimes not seeing the forest for the trees, that’s pretty much every day in the office here.”

That chemistry between the characters helped “Scorpion” average almost 11 million viewers per episode in season one and 9.7 million in season two thus far. But O’Brien readily admits that some of the action elements of the show are embellished.

“Now when they run around with guns, and punch each other out, and crash Ferraris, we don’t do all of that every day,” he said. “We’re heavily involved in government, defense, cyber work but obviously it’s more on the keyboard than it is on a machine gun.”

O’Brien also said he meets with producers and writers of the show at the beginning of the season and gives them stories from Scorpion’s archives that have been de-classified by the government or whose non-disclosure agreement has expired.

In this week’s episode, Team Scorpion goes undercover on the “Super Fun Guy” movie set in Kazakstan in order to disable a soviet era nuclear missile being sold by terrorists,

“Scorpion” airs on Mondays at 9 p.m./8c on CBS.

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