Robert Blake Gets Weird During CNN Interview, Piers Morgan Asks Him: "Are you sane?"

There's a reason why actor Robert Blake doesn't do a lot of interviews these days, and that was uncomfortably apparently last night when the man accused of killing his wife over a decade ago sat down with Piers Morgan.

When faced with the inevitable queries about the shooting death of Bonnie Lee Bakely, Blake asserted Morgan was calling him a liar. The actor also had some less-than-fond thoughts about his late wife, "calling her a con artist who moved to Hollywood to trick her way into show business," notes The Hollywood Reporter.

Blake, 78, said he was doing the interview to promote "Tales of a Rascal," his profanity-filled self-published memoir about his years as a child actor.

"I made a deal to come here and talk about anybody from the book," Blake told Morgan when pressed about Bakely's death. "I excused you from that deal because I thought you were going to be cool. Now you're trying to (bleep) into the ground."

The actor emphasized that Bakely's death (and his subsequent trial and acquittal) were not the most important moments in his life or career, and that his book was about his acting youth, not his dead wife.

Blake's replies were, as CNN summarizes, often "tirades," which prompted Morgan to calmly inquire of his guest: "Are you sane?"

It's not clear if it was to answer Morgan in the affirmative to the sanity question, but Blake managed to work in a funny old-timey insult to the host, calling him Charlie Potatoes and Charlie during the interview. (It's "from the 1958 movie 'The Defiant Ones' that describes a man who is rich and popular," notes CNN.)

Morgan, for his part, had a damn good time with Blake:

Here's a bit of the interview: