‘Boston Blue’ Actor Reacts to Backlash After He Replaced Longtime ‘Blue Bloods’ Star

Boston Blue actor Mika Amonsen is responding to the “negativity” he’s faced after being cast as Sean Reagan in the Blue Bloods spinoff over the role’s original actor, Andrew Terraciano.

“There’s been some negativity, for sure,” Amonsen told Us Weekly of the recasting in an interview published Friday. “But when I look under those posts that have the negativity, there’s a lot of fans rallying for Sean and people saying that they really enjoyed this character that I’ve created — or my version of character.”

Sean, the son of Donnie Wahlberg’s fan-favorite character Danny Reagan, was originally played by Terraciano for all 14 seasons of Blue Bloods, which aired from 2010 to 2024. However, when CBS announced that Danny’s world would live on with the new series Boston Blue, which premiered this fall, Amonsen was cast as the spinoff’s version of Sean.

Amonsen admittedly felt “a ton of pressure” taking over the role in the new CBS crime procedural, explaining, “I felt the pressure to respect an actor before me because I wanted to respect Andrew the best I could.” He added, There were even certain visual choices that I made that I wanted to keep in terms of hair styling and certain ways of being [as Sean].”

Amonsen also wanted to “respect” Terraciano’s version of his character. “I really want to maintain Sean as close as I can in the ways that I do it out of respect for this character that everyone loves — but also the character Andrew built,” he revealed, adding that after being cast on the show, he was “really thrown into it quickly,” and found that binge-watching later seasons of the show were the most helpful when it came to finding his Sean.

“I wanted to get a sense of who Sean was toward the end of the show,” he explained. “I really wanted to get a sense of his character at that point into adulthood and his relationship with Danny.”

Amonsen also wanted to add his own take on the character originated by Terraciano. “The showrunners, Brandon Sonnier and Brandon Margolis, have been really good at giving me a lot of freedom to explore that new dynamic with Donnie,” he said. “Watching Andrew’s performance, I actually noticed a lot of similarities just between us as people, and our energy. It’s quite upbeat. I have a lot more of an upbeat energy myself. So that was a bit comforting. I definitely kept that within myself and didn’t feel like I was obligated to change that part of me — which was nice — in terms of making it my own.”

“We’re really just exploring what would have been,” he concluded. “Of course, it is my own version of it but at the same time we haven’t seen this relationship with Sean and his dad before. He’s coming into this whole new position because from what I understand, the exploration of Sean being a cop wasn’t something that was on the table.”

Boston Blue airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS.