“Cheers” stars recall time they ditched work to get high on 'extraordinary amount of mushrooms'
Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and George Wendt detailed the hilarious memory on SiriusXM’s "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" podcast.
Cheers stars Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and George Wendt are taking a real trip down memory.
In an exclusive clip from the upcoming episode of Sirius XM's Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, hosts Danson and Harrelson are joined by Norm! — or rather, the man who played him, George Wendt — and together the trio reminisce on a time several cast members played hooky from the show and some got very high on "an extraordinary amount of mushrooms."
This "hooky day," as Danson called it, came to be thanks to the beloved sitcom's shooting schedule on that particular day, which happened to be "very female-heavy," and thus the male costars weren't needed as much. "So we felt like we could maybe [play hooky] — John had just bought a boat," Wendt explained, presumably meaning Cheers costar John Ratzenberger.
"A Boston Whaler," Danson clarified. "Yeah, and he was anxious to show it off, so we cooked up this little getaway," Wendt added.
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Danson, who played bar owner Sam Malone for all 11 seasons of Cheers, explained that by the time they all met at the boat, he and Harrelson — who played Woody Boyd on the show — were already stoned. At this point, they called into the producers to claim they weren't feeling well, which Wendt claimed he was "peer pressured" into doing too.
"So, we get on the boat," Danson recalled. "Kelsey [Grammer] immediately had been up all night playing cards, went down to the lower bunk, and fell asleep the whole way. He was sound asleep. Woody turns to me and goes, 'Have you ever had mushrooms?' And I go, 'No. No, I haven't.' And he said, 'Well, this will be a good time. We have nothing to do. We'll be out on a boat.' We hadn't had breakfast, so I was fairly hungry and ate I think an extraordinary amount of mushrooms, and then I'm thinking, 'Oh, this is all right.'"
It was anything but smooth sailing from there though — literally. As Danson explained, they were halfway to Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, and there were "leftover waves from a hurricane in Mexico," so the boat was contending with huge swells.
"So people not on mushrooms would be seasick pretty much," Danson explained. "But I sat there getting more and more and more freaked out and whatever it is — you get stoned or whatever it is on mushrooms — and I look at you, Woody, and you stretched out on a bunk, and I think, 'Oh, he's so used to this that he's just cooling it and relaxing. I am panicking. I'm having trouble breathing. I'll go up top.'"
Danson said at that point he joined Wendt at the top of the boat, who immediately clocked that he was high. "I came and sat down next to you and you looked at me and you went, 'You're high on something, aren't you?' and I kind of nodded sheepishly and John was like, 'Oh, for crying out loud,'" Danson recalled, adding that it was Wendt who kept him calm during his trip. "You spent the next 45 minutes poking me about every minute or two and said, 'Breathe,' because I would literally forget to breathe and feel like I was dying, and then you'd poke me.'"
Eventually, Danson remembered Harrelson coming to join them up top, but when he did, thanks to the drugs, Danson said his friend looked like "Woody the skeleton" to him. "That was my one kind of visual, you know, I looked at you and you looked skeletal. He looked like Woody the skeleton in my eyes. That was my only kind of visual buzz from mushrooms," Danson said.
According to the Good Place star, Wendt was his "lifesaver," thanks to the fact he wasn't high himself. Wendt — who says he's never done mushrooms — pointed out that he did, however, get seasick on the way back thanks to the "nasty" sea conditions.
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Ultimately, despite it being "the worst four hours" of Danson's life, he said he might be up to trying the experience again. "I think I'm ready to do mushrooms again because it is a good thing, right? Mushrooms?" he asked his costars. Joked Harrelson, "Well, I guess it depends on the setting, but definitely in the middle of a hurricane in the Pacific Ocean."
Watch the full trippy recollection in the video above. Wendt's episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name is available Wednesday on the SiriusXM app, the Team Coco Youtube page, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
