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

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.