Tom Selleck reflects on 15 years of Blue Bloods, recalls parting message to cast after final dinner sequence

The Reagans have finished their final family dinner.

Blue Bloods has officially concluded after 14 highly successful seasons on CBS, and the cast still isn't ready to say goodbye — including Tom Selleck, who portrayed Frank Reagan, the New York City Police Chief and patriarch of the central law enforcement family on the procedural. Selleck reflected on playing Frank for a decade and a half and detailed his emotional experience working on the series finale in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does it feel to be finished with Blue Bloods after 14 years?

TOM SELLECK: Well, I don't think it goes away that quickly. We finished shooting our last episode in July, but it's just now airing. It just takes an enormous amount of getting used to, which I'm still doing. I'm still doing interviews, obviously, about it and all, so it isn't kind of in the past yet, and it also takes a certain adjustment for a show that was still as successful as we were — and especially a show where everybody wanted to come back. So all those things are going to take quite a bit of getting used to.

What was your experience like filming that final episode?

The last shooting day was a very crowded scene that had an awful lot of the Blue Bloods principles, but no real time to sit together. The real last day for me was the second to the last day when we shot the last family dinner, which was really the end of my involvement in the show. And we did our work for about six or seven hours and didn't dwell on it. 

It was just suddenly when somebody said, "Well, we have to wrap it" — it was very quiet for a while. Nobody made speeches. It seemed like something needed to be said. I ended up saying a poem from Edna St. Vincent Mallay — "Love is Not All" — and that kind of started a discussion that lasted a couple hours. There were some tears and some hugs and group hugs, single hugs. Nobody wanted it to end.

So I went back home to L.A. and really felt I should be there when the show finished. So I flew back to New York and was able to watch them shoot the last scene. It was all pretty emotional. We loved the show. It was a blessing for 15 years. I mean, we had two families. We had the Reagan family that we portrayed, and quite quickly we had this family of actors who all actually liked each other, which never happens in television. So it was an enormous blessing. 

What's been the hardest part of the show ending?

The hardest thing I would say at this point [is] right now, this time of year, I would be shooting episodes of Blue Bloods, and I miss that. The thing that tugged at me most in adjusting and will continue is the family of actors we had and the friendships we formed. And you always say it's kind of like high school graduation. Everybody says they'll keep in touch and things happen. Well, that happens in movies too. You say you do a movie, establish relationships, and then it's over.

This is a more complicated one. It's a 15-year relationship with most of those people, and it just doesn't go away that fast. It's hard — on a movie, you always say, "Well, let's get together," and then you get busy or you work somewhere else and a couple of years go by, but this is just a bigger adjustment.

How do you feel you have changed or evolved as an actor over the course of this series?

All the work you do goes into a little something inside and broadens, hopefully, your perspective and your talent as an actor. I've always believed that the commitment an actor makes should appear to be, "Here goes nothing!" Make it look like "Here goes nothing." But it's really "Here goes everything." I would've thought that if I did a show for 15 years, the danger would be to get comfortable. "Okay, what are the jokes? I know this guy." 

But I continued to learn about Frank Reagan and watch him evolve as a character for 15 years. I was never bored. I'm proud to say nobody in this cast ever phoned a performance in, and that was the real danger. And frankly, it's surprising if I would've started a show and I said, "15 years, I'm going to get bored." It never happens. I'm grateful to say, and the writers continued to see the evolution in the characters and let them grow and change. 15 years is a long time, and you change physically, you change every other way. You're just older. At a certain point, all those things entered into what I'll put in my little actor's handbook and use, because I certainly don't intend to stop working.

My biggest goal is to make sure people realize we went out in rather spectacular success. It wasn't tired, it wasn't anything else. Somebody may be able to tell me someday why CBS wanted to end it, but I haven't had a good answer yet.

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All 14 seasons of Blue Bloods are streaming on Paramount+.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.