How the ‘Blue Bloods’ cast faked eating their way through Reagan family dinners: ‘We all have tricks’
Talk about a gag! The cast of “Blue Blood” revealed how they navigated through those family dinners for the past 14 seasons.
Tom Selleck finally let the cat out of the bag, revealing all of his co-stars have tricks to make it look like they are eating. He also admitted that some of his cast members are better than others at faking it.
“The truth can be told, because the eight episodes [of the final season] are done,” Selleck, who played the patriarch Frank Reagan for over a decade, said during a PaleyFest panel per Entertainment Weekly on Thursday ahead of the show’s final season.
He then broke down Bridget Moynahan (a k a Erin Reagan) and his secrets before putting the rest of his castmates — Donnie Wahlberg (Danny Reagan) and Vanessa Ray (Eddie Janko), who were also at the event — on blast.
“We all have tricks. Bridget is a food masher. She keeps her hand real active and combines her potatoes and everything,” Selleck shared at the event. “I butter rolls. I know everybody else has some tricks they might confess before it’s too late.”
Ray revealed she didn’t know everyone else was pretending when she first began filming, adding she quickly learned to join Moynahan’s potato mashing club.
“The first several times I was at the dinner table, I did eat the rolls. I didn’t just butter the rolls,” she said. “And I think Bridget, at one point, was like, ‘You sure you want to do that?’ I’m like, ‘Why? What?’ [And she said,] ‘Well, it’s your funeral, girl.’ And I kept eating and I realized, ‘Oh, you can’t eat 17 rolls.'”
On the other hand, Wahlberg claimed he ate every time but was selective in his food choices if he had an upcoming New Kids on the Block gig.
“There’s a silly part of the eating and a real part of the eating, and the silly part is if I was going on tour the following summer, I ate only vegetables,” he confessed. “If I wasn’t, I ate whatever. And I did get high a few times off the whipped cream in the desserts. I got these sugar highs. But, in truth, I wanted to eat as the character because I thought it was as far as I could go to talking with my mouth full in that first dinner scene.”
Wahlberg also said his tactic helped sell his character.
“It’s like, throw an insult across the table without even looking up, take a bite of my food, and keep moving,” he laughed. “I just thought it was a way to be a bull in a china shop in a place where I can’t really do it. There’s only so far you can go at the table, because if Dad doesn’t crack it with the head, Grandpa will. That was just my thing.”
Selleck shared how the Reagan family dinner table differs from his real-life one at home.
“At the Selleck family dinner table — when it was just my two brothers and my mom and dad, we’d always eat breakfast — you did not talk with your mouth full,” the actor stated. “So I can’t really do it at family dinner. So I said, ‘Well, you better not eat something, because you might not swallow it by the time your next line comes.’ Very complicated.”
The PaleyFest appearance was refreshing, considering Selleck has been doom and gloom since CBS announced it was canceling the series in November and Season 14 would be the last one.
The actor, 79, revealed he was “frustrated” with the decision following the show’s successful run. Selleck also claimed he might be unable to keep his California ranch without the steady income.
“That’s always an issue. If I stopped working, yeah. Am I set for life? Yeah, but maybe not on a 63-acre ranch!” the former “Magnum PI” star said.
It’s an emotional goodbye for the entire cast.
Wahlberg recently revealed that he and Selleck cried like babies while filming the last season.
“On the last day, I was filming all my squad room scenes and it’s kinda like where I hold court as Danny Reagan, and Tom Selleck came in just to watch,” he said on SiriusXM’s “Andy Cohen Live.”
“And like, I’m filming the scenes. I’m already emotional. I look across the room and I see him. He’s really tall, and he’s standing above everyone in the back corner just watching with tears in his eyes,” Wahlberg explained. “It just was like the waterworks turned on. I could literally cry just thinking about it.”
While “Blue Bloods” is gearing up to air its final episodes, CBS Studios president David Stapf has already teased a potential spinoff.
“There are endless possibilities as to what a Blue Bloods spinoff would look like,” Stapf said after the announcement. “We have a whole season [of Blue Bloods] to go … so there’s still time for us to figure a spinoff out.”
The final eight episodes of “Blue Bloods” last season will air on CBS starting tonight (Oct. 18) at 10 p.m. ET.