What you need to know
Charlie McDowell doesn’t necessarily want to see everything his mother does on screen.
On the Oct. 8 episode of Ted Danson’s podcast Where Everyone Knows Your Name, the Cheers alum, 77, shared a funny story about how his wife Mary Steenburgen’s son, Mr. McDowell, 42, suddenly barged in on his friends as they watched a scene from his mother’s risqué movie.
“Mary did the movie ‘Melvin and Howard,’ and she won an Academy Award for it, and she has this scene where she’s naked as a dancer in this bar, and it’s great and it’s amazing,” Danson explained to guest Kathryn Hahn. “When Charlie, her son, was probably 15 years old, he and his friends were bored and wandering around on a Friday night.”
Danson and Steenburgen, 72, each have two children from previous relationships, and became part of the family when they married on Martha’s Vineyard in 1995.
“[Charlie]went out to get a sandwich and came back in,” the Good Place actor continued. “His friend innocently arrived at the scene. When he clicked on it, Charlie came back and pulled him out. He was so angry, ‘That’s my mom! What are you doing?'”
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Hahn, 52, can empathize with McDowell’s experience. In fact, she and her husband Ethan Sandler’s 19-year-old son, Leonard Sandler, said he “just can’t watch” the movies from the time in her life when she was drawn to raunchy comedies.
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“He would be very embarrassed,” she says. “Just thinking about his mother in a movie like that and other things I’ve done is understandably a nightmare.”
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Hahn went on to mention a particularly explicit scene in the 2008 film Step Brothers, in which she co-starred Will Ferrell and Adam Scott, recalling that when she first showed the film to her son and 16-year-old daughter Mae Marie Sandler, “my husband and I fast-forwarded so much that I thought we were watching a 17-minute movie.”
Holding her hands in front of her, Danson said her mother had a very similar experience while watching the 1981 film “Body Heat.”
“I wasn’t with her, but people said she had her hands in front of her eyes the whole time,” he said jokingly.
