'Blue Bloods' actor Gregory Jbara: Show's end 'is not yet a fait accompli!'
Gregory Jbara plays NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Garrett Moore on "Blue Bloods." Credit: CBS
Gregory Jbara, who plays NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Garrett Moore in the CBS police-family drama “Blue Bloods,” says this 14th season may not be the last — and not simply because of semantics.
“Technically, the first 10 [current] episodes are going to wrap up season 14,” says the Tony Award winner, 62, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “Then the final eight episodes that we've yet to shoot are going to start season 15. And we're hoping CBS will see the numbers and sense that we can do another eight or 10 and flesh out season 15 for them. So we are not yet mourning the loss of the show,” he says. “The end is not yet a fait accompli!”
Even if it is, he undoubtedly will continue working, as he has for decades — including as Sen. Warren Magnuson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, in last year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “Oppenheimer,” and in the $60,000-budget independent feature “A Ramble Towards Rain,” shot entirely on the North Fork by first-time filmmaker Lisa Angell and premiering Sunday at 4:30 p.m. as part of the Queens World Film Festival in the Zukor Theatre at Kaufman Studios in Astoria.
Colin Bates as Frederick Owlman and Gregory Jbara as Buck in a scene from "A Ramble Towards Rain." Credit: Thirty-One Oaks
“Lisa was a PA [production assistant] on 'Blue Bloods,' and [screenwriter] Caleb [Lenderking-]Brill, who bills himself as Oscar Brill, was a PA on 'Blue Bloods' who then became an assistant in the location-scout department,” explains Jbara, “And it wasn't until after he had left the show,” going on to be a location scout on other series, “that he approached me with a script, asking if I'd be interested in doing it.”
Jbara agreed to spend a month working on Long Island, living in what he calls “a lovely little dormer above a garage of a home of friends of Lisa’s,” because “I was a huge fan of Caleb's and really was excited about the tone of the film and its ambition. … It also felt wonderful that I got to help make someone’s first feature come to fruition. So it was a mutually beneficial relationship.”
In the film he plays two roles: One is that of egocentric, bombastic TV star Buck Johnson, being looked after in his cancer-stricken final days by his beleaguered sister (three-time Tony-nominated writer-actor Sherie Rene Scott). The other, in fantasy sequences from the novel Buck is struggling to complete, is sweet-natured Hector, a bowler-hatted, “Waiting for Godot”-esque naïf on a quest for meaning, accompanied by a bird-winged, cigarette-smoking cynic (Colin Bates) in a pickup truck.
Gregory Jbara in a scene from "A Ramble Towards Rain," a new independent feature. Credit: Thirty-One Oaks
“Greg being Greg is so open to things, and he was enthusiastic and willing to meet with Caleb, it just kind of evolved from there,” says the Riverhead-born and Mattituck-raised Angell, 26, who has since become engaged to Lenderking-Brill, with whom she lives in Astoria. “Once we got Greg attached, we got the funding and all the stars aligned. And then we got Sherie and … it just snowballed beyond what we even thought was possible.”
Angell, a graduate of Mattituck Junior-Senior High School and Connecticut’s Fairfield University, bartered with local businesses for food for the cast and crew. “I made a bunch of promo videos for local places’ social medias and websites, and they gave us food for the crew, which is the only way that we would be able to come in on budget.”
Locations include a mansion in Peconic and that town’s Breeze Hill Farms and Peconic River Campgrounds. Macari Vineyards in Mattituck and Half Pint’s Dairy in Greenport supplied production parking space for shooting nearby.
