Blue Bloods has been on the air for 14 spectacular seasons—and now, it’s all coming to an end. The beloved police procedural is set to debut the second half of season 14 on Friday, October 18, with eight episodes airing through the end of the year. While fans will still have access to their favorite characters through CBS reruns and streaming apps, parting ways with the characters we’ve come to know and love will be bittersweet. But Abigail Hawk (Detective Abigail Baker) reminds us of the importance of simply being grateful for such a solid run of Friday night fun. In an exclusive interview with Country Living, the 42-year-old actress reflects on the most monumental role of her career, the reality of working with Tom Selleck, and more.
“I think I’m still almost in this state of denial,” she admits, acknowledging that her longest-standing, life-changing role has reached its final chapter. At this time of year, Abigail and the Blue Bloods cast is typically on set, filming episodes for the season ahead. “It’s just very strange to feel like we should be working and chomping away and to not have that happening is almost surreal,” she admits. “I almost feel as if time is suspended in a way. There’s this anticipatory waiting. We have episodes that will be airing shortly but it’s just surreal. I almost feel like I’m hovering above, observing my life, and I’m trying to look back but I can’t yet because I’m not far enough away from the fire of it. It’s still so present. It’s a third of my life.”
While she works to gain clarity on the situation, Abigail is grateful for her work on Blue Bloods and what the end of the show has meant for her personal life.
“Normally we start back filming right after the Fourth of July, so having the entire summer with my family was an enormous blessing,” she shared. “We spend our summers up in Maine and it was just really wonderful to have that outside time, to be in nature, and [to be] able to let my own thoughts in a little bit and just be in a reflective state of mind because I do think a pause is necessary. This is a massive shift and I think it’s important to acknowledge that the biggest part of my career thus far has come to an end, so everything that I’m feeling, whether it’s nostalgia, or grief, or relief that it’s over, those are all valid feelings and I’m trying to just sit with them and let them be what they are—not judge them, not feel like I have to move past them in a certain order. It’s a loss but it’s also a gain of more time with my family and getting to go, ‘Wow, I did that, and look at this beautiful foundation that I now have as I continue climbing; and tell my next story and become my next character–whatever that may be. It’s an exciting, interesting place to be.”
View this post on Instagram
She’d be remiss not to reminisce on her role as Detective Baker. On one hand, Frank Reagan’s right-hand woman was the polar opposite of Abigail in real life, which made for creative casting and boundary-pushing acting.
“The role as it was written on the page, there was no gender, there was no age, there was no race, there was really no anything, and so I was able to go in completely free and go, ‘Okay, here’s this absolutely blank slate where there’s no preconceived anything, what am I going to do with it?’” Abigail revealed. “Well, I went in, I prepared, I had fun, and it just so happened that I booked it, which, you know, is like lightning striking.”
While it was Abigail’s imaginative auditioning that landed her the part, it was her collaboration with Tom that transformed it from a guest-starring role to an enduring Blue Bloods character.
“My first day on set, Tom took me aside and said, ‘Hey, I really am working on curating this authentic reality and if we view Frank Reagan as this colossal, larger-than-life man as the king—the king, he can’t show his feelings; he can’t actually express what is going through his mind because he has the burden of being the leader, but his team—his inner circle, those that he trusts, and his advisors—they can show the stress of the job,’” Abigail reveals.
“I come from the theater world; I am a very expressive individual and here I was stepping into the shoes and self-creating this stoic, composed, poised, mature woman who was the exact opposite of me and just having him go—my favorite thing was when he’d take me aside and go, ‘I’m not trying to tell you what to do but if I were you, have you considered, maybe try…’ and then you would see this lightbulb go on and I would just nail the next take just because of some small tweak or suggestion that he would give me,” Abigail remembers.
Meanwhile, being Frank’s workplace confidant on-screen allowed Abigail to be so in real life, too.
“Seeing his approach to work has taught me an insane amount of lessons,” Abigail shares. “The authenticity that he brings, his absolute need for it to be right, but not perfect; I love that he made Frank Reagan flawed and messy and sometimes a little grumpy and perhaps he has to come to a decision through ways that are not necessarily the straight and narrow, you know, he walks around and dances around it, and it’s just—the humanness of it all and watching this mastercraftsman build what became such a venerable, beloved television character was very exciting for me as a young actor.”
And the fact that he was so willing to share his craft and the lessons he, himself, had learned in his career, felt like a pinch-me-is-this-real-life moment, time and time again, for Abigail.
“We started creating what became a completely elaborate and significant shorthand and he changed my life,” she admits. “If he had not seen something in me, seen a spark in me that I, to be totally honest, didn’t know that I had… I watched this man [growing up] and to have him standing there like the human embodiment of the Brawny paper towel man was just indescribably incredible. To now consider him one of my dearest friends, it’s just… Time is amazing. I’m just grateful, I’m so very grateful.”
Speaking of lessons, one of the things Abigail loves most about Tom is how measured he is, both on and off the screen.
View this post on Instagram
“When it comes to current events, he’s exceedingly well-spoken and well read but he’s also very measured when he’s forming an opinion on anything,” Abigail reveals. “He doesn’t share it all the time; he keeps his opinions to himself because they may differ from what everybody else’s opinions are, but if you are lucky enough to engage in that kind of dialogue with him, one of my favorite things about him is that he will read an entire spectrum of news sources and he forms his opinion based on everybody else’s perspective of the same situation which is the way I think news should be; it’s as unbiased as you could possibly be.”
Where Tom (and Frank) live by the facts, Abigail admits that that’s not as second nature for her. “I’m a very emotional person and any time there would be a hot-button item or something happened in our crazy, crazy world, [Tom] would say, ‘Alright, let’s talk about the facts. What are the facts? Let’s take your feelings out of it; what are the facts?’ And it was very grounding for me as a young mom, as a young actor,” she recounts.
As much as Abigail loved working with one of her childhood idols, she was enamored by the entire cast and crew on the set of Blue Bloods.
“Moments stand out where we just lost ourselves in absolute laughter but also just the behind-the-scenes stuff—the fact that we truly became a second family,” she shares. “My children were born while I was on this show and the love and support that I had; the hand-holding; the ‘Oh, of course, show me every single baby picture possible,’ the patience as I moved through these massive life changes, my hormones being all over the place, going through postpartum depression with my second son—this family was there and it truly chokes me up because it’s just the extreme care and love; there was just so much love… That’s what I’m going to remember: the things that were just ordinary parts of my world that really became extraordinary because of the people that were part of this massive, massive machine.”
Now that Abigail’s long-held network television stint has reached its end, she’s looking forward to the next big projects she’ll get to work on.
“I’m in the process of writing my first novel, which I so stupidly decided to set in Victorian-era London because historical fiction is obviously the way to go as a debut novelist, right, you know? We might as well pick a period that I would have never existed in,” she joked.
While she’s four years into the writing process—and has roughly 60 pages written in their second-draft state—Abigail is also setting her sights on other acting roles.
“I’ve been fortunate to have lots of auditions—nothing has popped yet but every audition is continued learning and observation,” she shares. “I have a couple of independent feature films that are in pre-production. We have to have money and funding to move forward with those but I am loosely attached, so those are things that I can set my sights on and that keep me [excited]. I love indie film—I have said this before: I just think it’s a very exciting medium to work in because there’s more creative freedom than there is with something like network television. You know, you’re not beholden to the shareholders. Indie film is scrappy.”
Abigail is also open to returning to stage acting. Her dream Broadway role? Playing Roxie Hart alongside Robert Clohessy (Sid Gormley) and Gregory Jbara (Garrett Moore) in Chicago. “I think the three of us would bring the house down to all be together doing that because it would be such a huge departure from these very serious characters that we’ve portrayed, to then just be—I mean, obviously Greg Jbara is a Tony winner, so that’s his neighborhood; he would be very comfortable there.”
Catch Abigail and the rest of the Blue Bloods cast in the final eight seasons of the series, starting Friday, October 18. For a full series re-watch, head over to Paramount+; limited episodes are also available on Hulu.