“cheers.”
On a recent episode of his podcast, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” the 78-year-old actor interviewed “Parent Trap” star Lisa Ann Walter and gave a surprising answer when she asked him, “What happened when you realized how attractive you were?”
“I don’t want to go back too far because I don’t have to, but I was literally the kind of guy where a woman was standing naked across from me and I was like, ‘What?’” I looked over my shoulder and said, ‘Are you talking about me? ‘I thought, ‘I was like, ‘I’m like, ‘I’m going to do this,”’ he said. “Literally until the second year of ‘Cheers,’ I decided, ‘You know what? Shut up, Ted.'”
The actor said that whenever he wasn’t on set and “someone said something” about his sex symbol status, he started protesting and said he was “going to have to swallow it” before getting caught.
He also said that when someone compliments him and says, “You’re so sexy and so funny,” it’s because of the show’s decision to “hire really sexy-looking women to make you look at Sam Malone and think, ‘Wow, he’s sexy.'”
“I took up that mantle and finally learned to keep my mouth shut,” he said.
Walter later assured Danson that while he may not have felt that way, “you were selling it” and it wasn’t just about “the women they put around you.”
Danson starred as Sam Malone on Cheers for 12 years, from 1982 to 1993, for which he won two Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Lead Actor.
“Cheers” ended after 11 seasons when Danson decided to leave the show to pursue other opportunities, and executives decided to end the show at the same time as Danson’s departure.
“I was changing for the better and I was working so hard at it that I thought, ‘Maybe I can just jump off a cliff completely,'” Danson shared about his decision to leave the show on an August 2025 episode of the podcast. “And then it was a little bit like… ‘If I don’t leave now, I might not know what else I can do, and I want to see if I can do something else.'”
After appearing on the show, Danson went on to appear in films such as Pontiac Moon and Saving Private Ryan, and had success on television shows such as Becker, Damages, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and CSI.
Most recently, he introduced himself to a young audience as a demon named Michael on The Good Place, a role that earned him three Emmy nominations.
“I love it when 12-year-old kids and their parents come up to me and say how much they love watching ‘The Good Place,'” Danson told Vanity Fair in June 2019. “I’m really grateful to be a part of a show that I think actually means something in a wonderful, silly, happy, uplifting way,” he said.
Danson currently stars in Netflix’s Man on the Inside, playing a retired professor who finds a new career as a spy.
