As Blue Bloods comes to an end, Tom Selleck and Donnie Wahlberg are reflecting on what undoubtedly made viewers feel like they were a part of the family — the show’s iconic Sunday dinners.
Over the course of 14 seasons, the procedural’s family dinners have become steeped in tradition and allowed characters to have a weekly check-in as officers working a dangerous job.
Now that the practice has become a part of Blue Blood’s signature, Selleck, 79, and Wahlberg, 54, are looking back on how they brought the scenes to life in a story for emmy magazine’s June issue, excerpted exclusively by PEOPLE.
“At the first dinner scene, I had to be fully committed to this character and who he was and his thoughts on the situation he was dealing with — and be willing to turn that dinner table upside down,” Wahlberg told the outlet for the issue, out June 1. “And to do that with Tom Selleck sitting at the head of the table? He’s an icon.”
Knowing that the moment would define his character Danny Reagan for seasons to come, the actor revealed that the writers originally wrote that he “says his piece and leaves it alone” during an argument with another family member.
“Well, that’s not how I saw the character,” he explained. “I had to make the commitment to go there with him. I could not hold anything back, because if I didn’t do it in the pilot episode, I wouldn’t be able to do it down the road.”
Selleck also revealed the cast learned that “timing” is crucial when it comes to performing a successful Sunday dinner scene. He added that the scenes are more difficult than expected because the audience is in on what each character is dealing with.
“Dinner scenes are hard because your focus is not what you’re eating,” he said. “It’s really not even your lines, it’s your subtext. Audiences don’t care about the words, they want to see the subtext. The family dinners are loaded with subtext, and the audience is in on it because they’ve seen what the characters are going through.”
Although the cast now has Sunday dinners down pat, Wahlberg said that it took time for them to evolve from a “really good cohesive cast who really respected each other” to a real “family.”
“There’s a genuine affection when we get together for dinner scenes,” he revealed. “There’s a genuine gratitude at that table. If anyone’s struggling, by the end of that dinner scene they’re back to being aware of how fortunate we all are.”
Wahlberg continued, “The Reagans are fortunate to be together on Sundays and to be safe, to have made it through another week of a very dangerous job, and the cast is reminded of how fortunate we are as actors. It’s an incredible blessing to have that dinner scene as a check-in every week, much like the Reagans do, fictionally.”
“For us to have that in real life, it’s a pretty spectacular thing — and I don’t think we’d be here 14 seasons without it,” he added.
Blue Bloods airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS and can be streamed afterwards on Paramount+.