A conversation with Tom Selleck
On Feb. 20, CBS will air “Stone Cold,” the Sunday night movie based on the Robert B. Parker (“Spenser: For Hire”) mystery series featuring Jesse Stone, a former hard-living, hard-drinking Los Angeles police detective who leaves the big city to become the hard-living, hard-drinking police chief of Paradise, a small New England town. The film focuses on Stone’s efforts to put his own life together in order to solve a series of murders and the rape of a high-school girl. Mimi Rogers (“The Door in the Floor”) stars as Rita Fiore, a lawyer who catches Stone’s eye. Emmy- and Golden Globe-awards-winner Tom Selleck (“Ike: Countdown to D-Day”) stars as Jesse Stone. Selleck is also one of the film’s executive producers.
Tom Selleck says there’s no mystery about why he agreed to play Jesse Stone in “Stone Cold.”
“I knew that it would be a quality work because of the people involved with it — all of whom I respected and many of whom I had worked with before,” Selleck says. “Robert B. Parker — who is one of the great mystery novelists of our time — created the Jesse Stone book series. And, of course, I had worked with him on ‘Monte Walsh.’”
One of the people with whom Selleck reconnected on “Stone Cold” was Emmy Award-nominated director Robert Harmon, who was part of the creative team on “Ike: Countdown to D-Day,” which earned both the film and Selleck — as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower — kudos with both viewers and critics alike. Which leads to the question: Any chance of Selleck doing an ‘Ike’ sequel, in which the former wartime general moves to the White House?
“Well, that (possibility) hasn’t been mentioned,” Selleck said. “But who knows? Maybe it will happen. I know I’ve done a lot of things I hadn’t expected to do, and I’ve always been glad that I did them.”
Coming up for Tom Selleck is another Western.
“I love the genre. There’s something about a Western that appeals to everybody,” Selleck says. “You know, although Westerns came out of the American experience, people all over the world love them.”
As for another Jesse Stone film at some point down the line (or maybe even a series), Selleck says, “I understand (Robert D. Parker) was very pleased with how the film turned out, and I know I’d love to play him again. Jesse is certainly a flawed character, which makes him interesting to play. But for all his faults, and for all his struggles with his inner demons, he’s a man who wants to do the right thing.”
In Focus
The “One Day at a Time Reunion,” airing Feb. 22 on CBS, reunites the stars of the long-running 1970s series in an hour-long get-together in which Bonnie Franklin (Ann Romano), Valerie Bertinelli (Barbara Cooper), Pat Harrington Jr. (Schneider) and Mackenzie Phillips (Julie Cooper) reminisce about the show and its impact on their lives.
Asked why she thinks the series remains a fond memory with fans 30 years later, Mackenzie Phillips says, “It had something to say that we needed to hear back then. Here we had Bonnie’s character, Ann, as a divorced woman raising two daughters and keeping down a job, and never whining about anything — not her life, not her problems. She simply decided to make the best of the situation, and she did. This spoke to a lot of people.”