15 November 2024
Ted Danson says Woody Harrelson got in a bar fight and was carjacked the first time they met on the set of ‘Cheers’.
Ted Danson says Woody Harrelson got in a bar fight and was carjacked the first time they met on the set of ‘Cheers’
The actor, 76, starred as baseball star-turned bar owner Sam Malone on the NBC sitcom alongside Woody, 73, as dim-witted bartender Woody Boyd when he joined the show from its fourth series, and Ted has now opened up about how his co-star left him stunned on their initial meeting.
He said on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ about Woody: “He is a whimsical creature. He’s astounding.
“He’s such a bundle of contradictions. I think the first day we met him on Cheers – we’d been together filming for three years – and he came and joined us.
“(He’d been in a) bar fight (and was) carjacked (the same day and I thought), ‘Oh dear God, that’s who that is’.”
But Ted’s fear he was acting alongside a wildman were upended when Woody asked him to read a poem he’d written.
He said: “(Woody asked), ‘Could you look at this poem I wrote?’ It’s like the most beautiful poem you’ve ever read.
“And he’s like, ‘Would you come see the play I wrote?’… and it’s a brilliant f****** play.
“You cannot pigeonhole that guy.”
Ted added: “One of my favorite Cheers stories is, waiting for (Woody), and he got to be about 30 minutes late for rehearsal.
“And we were going, ‘Well, what the hell?’ And someone came running in and said, ‘Woody called. He’s in Berlin. The wall is coming down and he didn’t wanna miss it’.
“That’s the whimsical side of Woody but also the magnificent side. He just bites off these big chunks of life. He’s just astounding.”
Ted previously said on the ‘Where Everybody Knows Your Name’ podcast about ‘Cheers’ they and their former co-star George Wendt played “hooky” from the set and experimented with hallucinogenics.
English (US) ·