By Michaela Gordoni
If you’re a BLUE BLOODS fan, your long-awaited question that’s undoubtedly popped in your mind at least once is finally answered: Donnie Wahlberg enjoyed the family dinners the most.
“Danny probably eats the most because Donnie’s the hungriest,” Wahlberg told TV Insider of his character. “Seriously, though, Danny is kind of a bull in a china shop. The best way to play that at dinner is to talk a lot with his mouth full.”
Every episode of BLUE BLOODS featured a trademark family dinner with the main characters, many of which included a prayer.
Wahlberg was more than happy to munch through the scenes. He especially enjoyed the main course and desserts (don’t we all), but when he had a New Kids on the Block concert coming up, he’d stick to vegetables, TVLine reported.
Related: BLUE BLOODS’ Donnie Wahlberg Explains the Significance Behind the Show’s Family Dinners
While Wahlberg was more enthusiastic, Tom Selleck and Bridget Moynahan were less so and would pretend to enjoy the meal for the camera.
“We all have tricks,” Selleck said before. “Bridget is a food masher. She keeps her hand real active and combines her potatoes and everything. I butter rolls. I know everybody else has some tricks they might confess before it’s too late.”
Wahlberg is quite attached to that dinner table, and he even kept the prop and put it in one of his family’s Wahlburger restaurants. How fitting.
“At the first dinner scene, I had to be fully committed to this character and who he was and his thoughts on the situation he was dealing with — and be willing to turn that dinner table upside down,” Wahlberg recalled in 2024. “And to do that with Tom Selleck sitting at the head of the table? He’s an icon.”
“Dinner scenes are hard because your focus is not what you’re eating,” he said. “It’s really not even your lines, it’s your subtext. Audiences don’t care about the words, they want to see the subtext.”
“The family dinners are loaded with subtext, and the audience is in on it because they’ve seen what the characters are going through,” he explained.
BLUE BLOODS writer Jack Ciapciak said the scenes were very complicated to film.
“You never want it to feel forced. You want it to feel natural and it’s the scene that brings people back week after week,” he explained. “Getting those scenes right was always the trickiest. Just how do you make that scene natural and entertaining and real? That was by far the trickiest.”
While there’ll be no more Raegan family dinners, the spinoff series, BOSTON BLUE, features family dinners and Shabbat with the show’s Silver family.
Read Next: What Actually Happened During Those Famed BLUE BLOODS Sunday Dinners
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