Ted Danson was so convinced he was so terrible at the role that would go on to define his career that he burst into tears.
The actor got his big break on NBC sitcom Cheers, which ran for 11 seasons from 1982 and made Danson a household name. In the show, he played womanizer Sam Malone, who owned the Boston bar where the TV series was set.
But after recording the pilot episode he went up to Cheers co-creator, James ‘Jimmy’ Burrows, and started crying.
“You know what I did when I saw the pilot?” Danson asked his The Good Place co-star D’Arcy Carden during her appearance on his podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name.
“I pulled Jimmy Burrows aside, and I started crying because I thought I was so bad, and he looked at me for about two seconds and started laughing and walked away in the opposite direction.”
Carden replied, “but what a thing to be a part of,” referring to his role on the iconic sitcom, which is considered one of the best TV comedies of all time.
“I had this moment years after where it dawned on me and I had this ‘holy moly moment’, that I got to play Sam,” Danson said.
The actor had Carden on podcast and their episode was released on Wednesday. During their chat, Danson revealed he was not sure she could pull off playing her character in The Good Place.
That NBC comedy follows people who have died and living in the afterlife. Carden played ‘Janet,’ a virtual assistant to Danson’s character, Michael, an “architect” of the afterlife.
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“I was thinking, ‘Poor D’Arcy Carden. I haven’t met her yet, but she’s playing this, I guess a robot in The Good Place. I think she’s gonna get bored very quickly,’ and it turned out to be one of the most iconic parts on television,” Danson told Carden.
He then echoed previous comments he’d made about Cheers co-star Shelley Long, who he also had trepidations about before she joined the cast as Diane Chambers, a waitress at the bar and Malone’s on-again, off-again love interest.
“I said that with Shelley Long playing Diane Chambers too, when I first met her. I thought ‘Oh, no, this is not right’, [but] she was like through the roof,” Danson said.
The Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning show ran for 275 episodes before ending in 1993, and helped launch the careers of its stars including Danson, Long, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman, Kelsey Grammer and the late Kirstie Alley.
It was revealed this week that Cheers would be getting a British reboot after a London-based company won the rights to adapt the comedy to the U.K market.