Tom Selleck said he almost missed playing iconic role on ‘Magnum, P.I.’: ‘It was a big fight’

Tom Selleck almost passed up one of his most iconic roles.

During a recent conversation with Ted Danson on his podcast, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” Selleck explained that a conversation with fellow actor James Garner about his issues with the original script of “Magnum, P.I.” ultimately convinced him to take the job.

“I’m sitting there, and I’m pretty preoccupied ’cause something had happened,” Selleck told Danson. “And he says, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I had a contract at the studio for a series, but I fulfilled that contract. Now the studio is assigning this show to me, saying the contract is still valid and that I have to do it.’ The show, incidentally, was called ‘Magnum’ and I hated it. It was terrible.”

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In the original script, written by Glen A. Larson of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Fall Guy,” Thomas Magnum had “no flaws, and he had two beautiful women on his arm and a Ferrari.”

Garner advised Selleck, “‘You don’t have much power, but if they want you, you’ll never have more power than you do right now. That’s all I’m gonna say.’ And I said no to the studio. And Jim Garner, in a way, just kind of saved my life. I would’ve been long gone from that version of ‘Magnum.’”

Selleck has made similar comments in the past – in 2015, he told AARP that the original version of the character was “very James Bond-like.”

He referenced Garner then, too, saying that he told the people behind the show that he’d prefer it if the character was more similar to Garner’s Jim Rockford on “The Rockford Files.”

“I said, ‘I don’t want to be Rockford, but I want to do something like that, where the guy is fallible,'” he said at the time.

Selleck admitted to Danson that “it was a big fight for a long time,” saying that his lawyer later told him that he would have a choice of three submissions for “Magnum, P.I.”

By that time, Selleck said he had done a miniseries called “The Sacketts,” “which was a huge, huge break. So they knew that I could handle a series. And so, they gave me a choice. ‘And you’re gonna meet with these writers.’”

Selleck said he had never met with a writer, “And now the writers are auditioning for me.”

He told “Magnum, P.I.” co-creator Donald P. Bellisario, “I want to do something like ‘Rockford.’ I want a character with flaws and some heart.’ And he said, ‘Say no more.’ He did. And he came back in about two weeks with the best TV movie I had ever read at the time, and it was called ‘Magnum.’”

Selleck admitted to Charlie Rose in 1997 that he’d “bet the farm” by pushing back so hard on the initial script.

“They said I can’t do that, and I said ‘I know I can’t, but I’m going to, and you’ve got to change this, or I can’t do it,'” he told Rose, adding that “had it not worked out, I think I would have gotten a pretty good reputation for being difficult and never worked again. But the point was I wanted to play a flawed guy.”

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The “Blue Bloods” star told Danson he refuses to ever call the show anything but “Magnum” because after the studio lawyers looked at it, they worried Clint Eastwood would sue over the title’s similarity to “Magnum Force,” “So, we’ll put a P.I. there.”

“I did not like that,” he said. “But we lost that battle. P.I. in Hawaii is not the most flattering term for Filipino Islander, and I was living in Hawaii at the time, and I just … so I don’t call it that name, I call it ‘Magnum.’”

At the time, Selleck said that despite his success with “The Sacketts,” he had done six unsold pilots, “and I know what they were saying. They’re saying, ‘Who the hell does he think he is? He’s never even gotten on the air.’ So, if it hadn’t worked, I would’ve been long gone and back with United Airlines pretty quick.”

Selleck had participated in United Airlines’ management training program while studying business in college.

“But, I don’t know, it was a risk. I’m not sure my dad ever said, ‘Risk is the price you pay for opportunity,’ but he lived his life that way. And this seemed to me to be the time to take a risk.”