Tom Selleck's Genius Hack for Surviving Blue Bloods' Family Dinner Scenes
Eating for five hours straight is no easy task, so Blue Bloods actors have to come up with different tricks.
Guess a show by three phrases: law enforcement, Tom Selleck 's mustache, and family dinner. Of course, we're talking about Blue Bloods, the CBS police procedural that revolves around the personal and professional lives of the Reagan family, each of whom is connected to law enforcement in one way or another.
Since its premiere in 2010, Blue Bloods has become one of the most popular TV shows. Its many viewers love the procedural for the Reagan bond, often shown through the family's Sunday dinner, which has long become the centerpiece of almost every episode.
The cast shared that the dinner scenes are as special to them as they are to the Reagans. It's a chance for all the actors to get together and catch up on what's going on in their lives.
But unlike the fictional family, which spends a normal amount of time at the table, the cast is usually on set for hours at a time. With close-ups of all nine characters and re-arranging the table and food after each take to maintain continuity, shooting the dinner scenes is a long process that can take up to five hours.
Of course, it is impossible to eat for five hours straight. So the actors have to come up with some tricks to get through dinner without getting a stomachache.
Some have learned to be good at faking it, some cut up their food and move it around the plate, but the most ingenious hack definitely belongs to Tom Selleck, who plays the Reagan family patriarch, Frank. During an interview with HuffPost, Donnie Wahlberg, who portrays the eldest sibling, Danny, revealed Selleck's secret technique:
"Tom picks up a roll or bread and butters it. So during all of his lines, he's just like this [pretends to be buttering bread] so he looks like he's having dinner."
Selleck's co-stars admitted to being jealous of the trick, which allows the actor to look active without eating a bite. But once a cast member uses a trick like that, others can't sneak it in, lest scenes feel repetitive.
However, Wahlberg, who actually eats most of the food at the Reagan table, stated that he will certainly use Selleck's hack in his next project if it has a dinner scene.