This Tom Selleck Movie Was So 'Lousy' It Changed His Entire Life and Career

04/19/2021 09:00 am EDT

Even actors as successful as Tom Selleck have had their career ups and downs. The Blue Bloods star recently stopped by The Drew Barrymore Show and did a brief career retrospective with the talk show host. After recounting his extremely brief time on Charlie's Angels and Barrymore's shock at seeing him without his signature mustache — "It is possible, I was born without it," Selleck quipped gamely — the conversation turned to the lowest point in Selleck's career.

Barrymore asked Selleck about how he maintains a work-life balance, and he revealed that things had really gotten out of whack for him in the early '90s. After coming off of making Mr. Baseball — a movie that Selleck is "proud of" — for four months in Japan, Selleck was offered a role that he felt he couldn't refuse. "So I got home and I got offered this movie where I got to work with Marlon Brando. Well, he's, you know, kind of the man in my generation," Selleck explained.

"It actually wasn't really a very good script and it turned out to be a lousy movie," Selleck admitted. "It was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. I was so thrilled with the idea of working with Marlon Brando that I just said I gotta go, but here's what happened. My daughter got viral pneumonia before I left, so I stayed as many days as I could before going to Madrid where we're gonna shoot it. She was out of the hospital the day I left, but it really bothered me."

"And it really was, I don't know whether it was an ego trip but it was the work out of balance with life," Selleck concluded. "Yeah, I went and did the movie, the movie wasn't really worth doing, frankly. I think Marlon was really in it for getting $5 million for two weeks work and it just bothered me. So I took a year off and a year off turned into three, frankly. I love the work, but it gets out of balance." Blue Bloods was recently renewed for a 12th season by CBS, so it's clear that Selleck is doing something right, even if he had to take some twists and turns in his career to get there.

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