Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson reveal they took a ‘hooky day’ on ‘Cheers’ to do mushrooms
Sometimes even a bar can’t fix your fix.
“Cheers” stars Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson once had a “hooky day” during their time on the iconic TV show to get high on mushrooms.
On the Tuesday, Aug. 13, episode of Danson and Harrelson’s “Cheers” podcast titled “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” the duo brought on George Wendt, 75, who played Norm Peterson on the show, and shared their trippy tale.
“John had just bought a boat,” Wendt recalled of his “Cheers” co-star John Ratzenberger, who portrayed the beloved character Cliff Clavin on the series. “And he was anxious to show it off, so we cooked up this little getaway.”
Danson then shared that when they met up on Ratzenberger’s boat — skipping work to do so because it was, in Wendt’s words, “a very female-heavy” shoot day — he and Harrelson, 63, were “stoned.”
“So, we get on the boat,” Danson, 76, 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,” Danson continued. “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,” the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actor went on. “And I ate I think an extraordinary amount of mushrooms, and then I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is all right.’”
But things were not all right, as they faced dangerous waves while boating off the Southern California coast thanks to the outer bands of a hurricane near Mexico sending massive swells their way.
“So people not on mushrooms would be seasick pretty much,” Danson added.
“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[‘re] stretched out on a bunk, and I think, ‘Oh, he’s so used to this that he’s just cooling it and relaxing.’”
Danson had a different reaction. “I am panicking,” he said. “I’m having trouble breathing,” explaining that he then decided to “go up top” — thinking things might be better on the deck than in the hull.
Wendt ended up being there to calm Danson’s nerves, “poking” the star of “The Good Place” every minute for roughly 45 minutes and reminding him to breathe.
Danson called Wendt a “lifesaver.” Wendt’s method of soothing the actor was not, it seems, learned from any personal experience with mushrooms, as he shared that he had never tried them himself.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest TV shows ever, “Cheers” ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993.
The series garnered 28 Emmys over its run and spawned the hit spinoff “Frasier,” in which Grammer starred and won four Emmys.
