Credit: CBS
Tue 18 August 2026 20:15, UK
Depending on how old you are and your television preferences, you’ll know Tom Selleck best as either the guy from Magnum PI, the guy from Friends, or the guy from Blue Bloods.
Obviously, there’s much more to his career than that, and you’d bloody hope so, considering he made his screen debut in 1969, but despite being one of the more prominent TV actors of his generation, Selleck and his mighty moustache have never quite made a successful leap into cinematic stardom.
Famously, or infamously, if that’s how you want to look at it, he could have been, since everyone knows he was the front-runner to play Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, only for scheduling conflicts to rule him out of the 1981 masterpiece, opening the door for Harrison Ford to create another icon.
In terms of his big-screen endeavours, Selleck hasn’t made much to write home about. Other than Three Men and a Baby, and even that isn’t exactly a world-renowned picture, how many half-decent films has he starred in that you can name off the top of your head? A couple, maybe, and even that’s a stretch.
That doesn’t detract from the fact that he’s a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-winning performer, or one of the most respected small-screen stalwarts of his era. It does make it pretty clear that he’s never been a movie star, though, and it doesn’t help that he’s made some truly reprehensible pictures.
There’s one in particular that Selleck would rather pretend had never existed at all, and not only does he know that it was rubbish, but the minute number of people who paid money to see it at their local theatre knew it, too, with a Razzie for ‘Worst Actor’ rubbing salt into a wound he tried to save himself from.
“There’s only one movie I say ill things about,” he intoned. “I was offered Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, with Marlon Brando, who in my generation was the man. I said I’d only do it if Brando was in it. But when I got on set, instead of seven scenes with Brando, there was only one, and he didn’t speak.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
That would be the same Marlon Brando who pocketed the princely sum of $5 million for his contributions to the 1992 historical biopic, laboured his way through his minimal screentime with as little effort as possible, and then roundly trashed his work in The Discovery as the worst performance of his legendary career.
Everything he said was true, and the same goes for Selleck, who knew from the start that he and the movie were equally doomed, but a not-so-thinly-veiled threat kept him aboard. “I tried to quit, but I was warned I’d be sued,” he admitted. “It was a horrible movie! I realised that wanting to act with someone, even Brando, was a bad reason to take a role.”
