Why Tom Selleck ‘Didn’t Like’ His Early Magnum, P.I. Stardom: ‘It Was a Lot to Adjust to’

Tom Selleck opened up recently about his discomfort with his runaway stardom in the 1980s.

On an episode of the Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (sometimes) podcast, the Blue Bloods star, 79, sat down with Danson to discuss his decades-long career, including what he described as a “melancholy period in Hawaii” while waiting for filming to begin on the first season of Magnum, P.I. during the 1980 SAG-AFTRA strike.

The series, in which he played the titular private investigator Thomas Magnum, marked a breakthrough for Selleck after about a decade of appearing in small parts and guest appearances in films and TV shows. As Danson noted, during Magnum, P.I.’s peak, Selleck was “arguably one of the biggest stars in the world.”

“I didn’t like it,” Selleck said of all that sudden attention. “Mainly because of family and a sense of privacy.”

“I started getting asked questions in interviews that I didn’t want to say — give an answer to,” he added. “I was trying to — I said, ‘You better find a way and find a line about what you’re going to talk about.’ I didn’t always succeed, but it just grew, and I still can’t quite describe it.”

“But I wasn’t going through it every day,” Selleck continued.

He explained that in the show’s early days, he was somewhat insulated from the hype, living a life not dissimilar to that of his character.

“I had a lovely house in Hawaii,” he said. “It was a tiny little house — a one-bedroom house. I rented it. I later bought it. It’s the first house I could ever afford. And I belonged to a place called the Outrigger Canoe Club, and that was local people. And, yeah, they kinda knew I was an actor, but that time — while the actors were on strike, and we couldn’t start the show, start shooting — was great.”

“I actually was living Magnum’s life at the beach and stuff,” he noted.

That all changed after the series became a hit, earning Selleck his first People’s Choice Award in 1981 as well as Golden Globe and Emmy nominations every year from 1982 to 1986. “It was really, I don’t know, a lot to adjust to, I think,” he told Danson.

Still, he noted that shooting in Hawaii helped. “Say the same show was in L.A., and it got the same kind of heat,” he said. “I don’t know how people do that. I had this huge buffer, and it was a blessing.”