Key Points
Ted Danson says it took time to get used to playing a ladies’ man on Cheers.
The actor played Sam Malone on all 11 seasons of the sitcom, from 1982 to 1993.
Danson says that his philosophy off the set was to just be quiet and let his on-screen persona do its thing.
The ladies loved Cheers barkeep Sam Malone.
Ted Danson played the character of the ladies’ man on the NBC sitcom’s full 11 season run between 1982 and 1993, and it took him a while to feel comfortable in that position.
“The woman would be standing opposite me naked, and I’d be going, ‘What?'” Danson said on a recent episode of the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast he sometimes cohosts with his former costar, Woody Harrelson.
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Danson explained to his guest for the day, Lisa Ann Walter, who said she’d considered him a “hottie,” that he had to get used to being the leading man.
“I’d look over my shoulder and be like, ‘You mean me?'” he said. “Literally, it took me until the second year of Cheers when I decided, you know what? Keep your mouth shut, Ted.”
Ted Danson at the Actor Awards on March 1
Credit: Monica Schipper/WireImage
In other words, just let them think you’re Sam.
“The show hired very sexy looking women to look at Sam Malone and go, ‘Wow, he’s sexy,'” Danson said. “I got that mantle, and I finally learned to keep my mouth shut. When I wasn’t on the set and somebody would say something. I would go, ‘No, I….’ I’d have to swallow it.”
Sam’s long list of love interests notably included Diane Chambers, who was played by Shelley Long in the show’s first five seasons, and Rebecca Howe, played by Kirstie Alley who joined the cast in the fifth season.
Outside of the NBC sitcom, Danson starred alongside Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg in the 1987 box-office hit Three Men and a Baby and its 1990 sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady. In 1989, he was also the leading man in the romantic comedy Cousins, in which starred opposite Isabella Rossellini.
These days, Danson said, he doesn’t appear in many love scenes, although he recalled having done one with his wife, Mary Steenburgen, whom he married in 1995.
“Mary and I worked together last year, a couple falling in love,” the A Man on the Inside star said. “And she goes, ‘They better not have us kiss. It’s just not right to have us kiss.'”
Danson, 78, said Steenburgen, who’s five years younger, thought they were too old. But they did the kissing scene on his Netflix series anyway.
Watch the full episode above.
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