Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson Unique Nicole/Getty Images
The leading men of Cheers have revealed they ditched filming for a day to get high on mushrooms together.
Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson and George Wendt, who played Sam Malone, Woody Boyd and Norm Peterson, respectively, on the beloved 80s comedy series, reminisced about the experience during the Wednesday, August 14, episode of the “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast.
Hosted by Danson, 76, and Harrelson, 63, the podcast brought in Wendt, 75, to take a trip down memory lane, leading to the group’s hilarious recollection of their “hooky day,” as Danson called it, alongside other Cheers costars.
“John had just bought a boat,” Wendt starts, seemingly referring to a fourth Cheers actor, John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Clavin. “And he was anxious to show it off, so we cooked up this little getaway.”
Danson then explained that when everybody met on the boat, he and Harrelson were already “stoned.”
“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.’”
The ‘Cheers’ cast Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images
But things turned awry when lingering waves from a Mexican hurricane pushed the boat into sizable swells off the Southern California coastline.
“So people not on mushrooms would be seasick pretty much,” Danson said. “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.’”
Eventually, Wendt managed to settle Danson down by spending 45 minutes “poking” the Curb Your Enthusiasm star every minute or so to remind him to breathe.
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Danson attributed his subsequent safety to Wendt, labeling him his “lifesaver.” Wendt added that he has never tried mushrooms himself.
Cheers ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993 on NBC and is widely considered one of the greatest TV series in history, earning 28 Emmy Awards.
The show also produced two spinoffs: The Tortellis and Frasier. Grammer, 68, returned for the Frasier reboot, which premiered in October 2023 on Paramount+