Tom Selleck Tells Ted Danson He “Still Can’t Quite Describe” What Happened During His Magnum P.I. Days
The 79-year-old actor reflected with his good friend on being catapulted into stardom.
Tom Selleck has made his first-ever podcast appearance!
On an episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson, Tom sat down to promote his new book, You Never Know, and discuss his storied career — from his days filming Three Men and a Baby to captivating television audiences as New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods.
But when his friend Ted Danson asked about Magnum P.I., the series that really launched Tom’s career, the actor got quite vulnerable about his time on the show.
“I didn’t like it,” Tom admitted. “Mainly because of family and a sense of privacy and I started getting to ask questions in interviews that I didn’t want to say, give an answer to. I was trying to, I said, ‘You better find a way and find a line about what you’re going to talk about.’ I didn’t always succeed, but it just grew. I still can’t quite describe it, but I wasn’t going through it every day.”
“It” being the stress of trying to fly under the radar and maintain some sense of normalcy as a 6’4″ megastar.
“I had a lovely house in Hawaii,” Tom continued in the interview. “It was a tiny little house—a one-bedroom house. I rented it. I later bought it. It’s the first house I could ever afford. I belonged to a place called the Outrigger Canoe Club, and that was local people. They knew I was an actor, but that time—while the actors were on strike, and we couldn’t start the show, start shooting—was great. I actually was living Magnum’s life. At the beach and stuff. So it was really, I don’t know, a lot to adjust to, I think. I don’t know how people… Say the same show was in LA, and it got the same heat. I don’t know how people do that. I had this huge buffer, and it was a blessing.”
Over 40 years since Magnum P.I. premiered, and it’s safe to say Tom has gotten a little more accustomed to the limelight — especially after over a decade of nonstop fanfare surrounding Blue Bloods. The end of an era is in sight, though. New episodes of Blue Bloods Season 14 — the final season of the franchise — premiere on October 18, 2024.
