Donnie Wahlberg is deeply grateful for Blue Bloods. The New Kids on the Block singer takes his final bow (or is it?) as Danny Reagan in Blue Bloods‘ final season, now airing on Fridays on CBS, alongside his costars Tom Selleck, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, and more. Wahlberg stopped by the TV Insider office to look through TV Guide Magazine’s new Blue Bloods special issue, our farewell to the long-running procedural.
The actor gets emotional while flipping through the issue in the video interview above, reflecting on revering TV Guide Magazine as a kid.
“There are moments in life when something happens that just kind of puts your life into perspective, not just your work or your career,” Wahlberg says. “This final episode of Blue Bloods — and this! I remember going into grocery stores with my mom as a little kid and seeing the TV Guide right there at the checkout counter and wanting to get one but we couldn’t afford it. We could only just get what groceries we could, and anything extra was not coming into our house. And now I’m on the cover of a special edition, and it’s something that I worked on. I’m next to the guy from Magnum P.I., who I grew up watching.”
He continues: “It puts not only the show in perspective, it puts how fortunate we all are on the show [in perspective]. I’m sure everybody in the cast and crew worked a good part of their lives to be able to be part of something that could be a fraction of this successful. To see this and know how much it means to so many people around the country and the world, from that little kid who couldn’t even read about Magnum, P.I. because we couldn’t afford the TV Guide to now be on the cover next to him playing his son for 14 years — I dreamed big as a kid, but it’s beyond what I could have ever dreamed of.”
Wahlberg says that he’s “very grateful for the journey,” and he’s “not sad” that it’s coming to an end. “I’m just incredibly grateful,” he shares. But that’s not the only Blue Bloods TV Guide Magazine cover he graces for the fourteenth and final season. He and costar Marisa Ramirez have a Danny and Baez cover as well. Wahlberg shares what seeing Ramirez, whom he calls “one of [his] closest friends,” on her first TV Guide Magazine cover means to him.
“This meant a lot to see her on the cover, ’cause so many characters on the show make the show better. It’s not just the Reagans,” Wahlberg explains. “There are so many other characters, and I think her gracing the cover with me speaks to our friendship, to our partnership, and also to the importance of the other cast members whose last name is not Reagan. Marisa worked tirelessly as much as anyone, and so many of the other cast members did. To me, she doesn’t just represent her on this cover, she represents the rest of the cast.”
Wahlberg signed some of our Blue Bloods: The Special Farewell Edition copies while in our office in New York City, and we’ll be giving some away for fans. Five lucky participants in our quiz below, selected at random from those who received a perfect score, will receive a copy! The quiz can be taken now through November 13 at 11:59 pm ET. Winners will be notified via email after that. The quiz consists of 18 questions, one for every episode of Blue Bloods‘ final season in total, and are a mix of multiple-choice and true-or-false prompts. Good luck!