Beginning with his 11-year run as bartender Sam Malone on the hit ’80s sitcom Cheers, actor Ted Danson has found a way to remain in our homes and hearts. With leading roles in shows like Becker, multiple iterations of CSI, and The Good Place, he’s known for playing appealing, witty characters with a healthy dose of charm.
Perhaps that’s what drew creator Michael Schur to Danson for his latest series, A Man on the Inside. After working together on The Good Place, in which Danson played an afterlife architect, Schur called on the actor again for his new retirement home crime comedy. The casting was spot on, and the timing was right — Danson had just begun thinking he wanted to explore what it means to age on-screen. “I’m 77. I’m the walking embodiment of the human condition with all its frailties,” he reflects. “Even before they reached out to me, I was thinking I wanted to discover what it is to try to be funny and act at every age of my life. I want to know what it’s like with all the aches and pains.”
Loosely based on Maite Alberdi’s Academy Award-nominated documentary The Mole Agent, A Man on the Inside centers on Danson as Charles, a recent widower and retired engineering professor who answers a newspaper ad to go undercover to catch a necklace thief in a retirement home. A heartwarmingly hilarious whodunit unfolds, as Charles encounters an entertaining, three-dimensional mix of senior citizens and staff while coming to terms with his wife’s death from Alzheimer’s disease.
Danson has come a long way from his film debut in the 1979 crime drama The Onion Field. He didn’t truly get his big break until 1982, the year Cheers premiered, which quickly propelled him to stardom. Throughout his career, Danson’s acting agility has allowed him to transition between drama and comedy, with memorable turns in series including Damages, Fargo, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now, with the second season of A Man on the Inside on the horizon, the two-time Emmy winner (and 18-time nominee) plans to stay active, his signature sense of humor as strong as ever: “I think that’s the reason why I keep working. I don’t want somebody to only have seen me on reruns of Cheers and then see me on the street and go, ‘Oh geez, he looks like shit.’ ”
An edited excerpt of the conversation from Skip Intro with Krista Smith follows.
“Damages”
“Fargo”
I watched A Man on the Inside, and it packs a punch that I was not expecting. That frustration of trying to communicate with your children. Dealing with aging parents. All the things that we never talk about in our society.
That’s Mike Schur. He is so good at picking topics about the human condition, about our frailties. He makes sure it’s funny so that people will take whatever medicine is coming their way. He did it with The Good Place — he gave an ethics lecture, and yet people devoured it. The truth is, I’ve been dying for him to call me [again] and say, “Would you be in anything?” I just wanted to work with him.
Did you have the same first-day-of-shooting anxiety that you might have had in any of the other series that you’ve been doing for 40 years?
First off, I was surrounded by truly wonderful, brilliant actors. The opportunity to work with Stephen McKinley Henderson is something I will cherish for the rest of my life. All of the younger folks — Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Lilah Richcreek Estrada, Stephanie Beatriz — everybody was so good. And to get to play with Sally Struthers. [With] Susan Ruttan who plays Gladys [a resident who has dementia] — you’re always making use of something so sad and tragic to tell your story or to get a laugh, but she was so tender and real that you couldn’t deny that we were talking about something very real, very sad.
“The Good Place”
“Becker”
Then it lands on Netflix, and suddenly you see the Netflix Effect.
I haven’t had that kind of energy coming at me from the audience since maybe Cheers, but that came in layers. This was: boom. Sweet people of all ages [would come up to me].
It wasn’t fanning out. It was people saying, “Thank you. I needed that.” Somebody asked Mike, “What is the response you want people to get?” And he said, “I want to hear that people called their parents.” And people did.
You have that great scene when you say to the son who [hired the investigator], “I think your mom just wants to be visited.”
It is, for all of us, a big issue. You are in that position of having kids and parents, and you get stuck in between and you get pulled [in multiple directions] and you have a busy life, and it’s tough. Nobody gets to read a book and go, OK, I got it. Nobody gets to prepare for what it’s like to lose a partner or a parent. It happens, and you go through it. And Mike captures that.
“Cheers”
You’ve been a series regular in 12 TV shows. What are the ingredients that make you think, “Oh, this is definitely going to work”?
It’s people who really care about trying to do the best thing they can. I’ve been so blessed. The writers that I’ve [worked with on] Fargo, Damages, Cheers, and Becker — all amazing writers. [With A Man on the Inside,] I’m surrounded by people who make me have to be as good as I can be because I have to respond to what they’re throwing my way.
What is your favorite part of the day when you are working?
It doesn’t matter whether I’m working or not working. [My wife] Mary [Steenburgen] and I play Wordle and Connections and Spelling Bee, the New York Times games. We have two cups of coffee and we’re just flying high. And we’ll wake up at a quarter to 4 if our call is at 6 if we’re working [in order] to have that. If I get to have that hour and a half with Mary, playing, I’m set up for the rest of the day. Everything else is great.
Listen to Ted Danson’s full conversation with Krista Smith on the
A version of this story appears in Queue Issue 20.
