Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson and the Cast of “Cheers ”Once Played 'Hooky' with an 'Extraordinary Amount of Mushrooms'
Looking back on the experience, Danson called the trip from taking drugs "the worst four hours of my life"
Ted Danson's one and only experience with mushrooms did not exactly go to plan.
Danson and Woody Harrelson had their former Cheers costar George Wendt as a guest on their podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, on Aug. 14, and the trio recalled a day where they played "hooky" from the show – and Danson, 76, experimented with some hallucinogenics.
John Ratzenburger, who played Cliff Clavin, had just bought a boat so the cast decided to spend the day sailing to Catalina Island, prompting Harrelson, 63, to offer Danson some drugs – and all the while, Kelsey Grammer was in a bunk sleeping.
"Woody turns to me and goes, 'Have you ever had mushrooms?' 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 on a boat,'" Danson recalled. "We hadn't had breakfast, so I was fairly hungry and ate, I think, an extraordinary amount of mushrooms."
Related: Will Arnett and Woody Harrelson Joke Ted Danson Had 'BDE' on Cheers (Exclusive)
At first, the actor, who played Sam Malone on the '80s sitcom, said it was going "alright" as they began sailing from the California coast to Catalina Island, but what the group wasn't accounting for was "the leftover waves from a hurricane in Mexico."
"There was still a huge swell. So people not on mushrooms would be seasick, pretty much. But I sat there getting more and more and more freaked out in whatever it is you get – stoned or whatever it is – on mushrooms," Danson continued. "And I look at you, Woody, and you’re stretched out on a bunk, and I think, 'Oh, he's so used to this that he's just cooling and relaxing. I am panicking. I'm having trouble breathing. I'll go up top.'"
Danson said he would "literally forget to breathe" and felt like he was "dying" during the trip. When Harrelson came to sit beside him on the upper deck of the boat, he recalled his costar looking "skeletal."
"You looked like Woody the skeleton in my eyes. That was my only kind of visual buzz from mushrooms," he recalled.
Wendt, 75, said he did not partake in the drugs, but was "seasick" on the way back anyway from how rough the ocean waves were.
Harrelson, who played Woody Boyd on Cheers, said that Danson looked "like a hologram of [him]self," adding, "I thought you really – you just weren't breathing at all."
Danson then declared the trip "the worst four hours of my life."
Wendt, who played Norm Peterson, recalled that the cast "were in such trouble" afterwards for playing hooky. "I didn't think anyone would give a s---," he said.
"They called us in, one at a time, to give a s--- the next day," Danson said.
In retrospect, Harrelson said that was a "fair" response. "We shouldn’t have done that," he acknowledged.
"But we’d been perfect for six, seven years," Danson said. "Their complaint was, ‘You should have told us. We would have let you.' And it was like – that's not hooky!"
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