Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson. Getty Images (2)
Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson’s decades-long friendship reached a new level after Danson helped patch up his former Cheers costar following a motorcycle accident.
Danson, 76, and Harrelson, 62, were set to appear on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” but the interview got pushed back when Harrelson was struck while riding his motorcycle in Los Angeles.
“I was passing this Tesla on the left that I thought was moving a little slow, but I didn’t realize he was moving slow because he’s taking a left,” Harrelson said on the episode, which dropped on Sunday, June 16. The actor explained that he likes to ride a motorcycle around L.A. because it’s generally a quicker mode of transportation, adding, “Today it proved to not be very fast.”
Harrelson added about the wreck, “There was some pain involved, but I never thought I’d be killed or anything.”
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name! The critically acclaimed sitcom Cheers aired from 1982 to 1993, following a group of locals who hung out at a Boston bar of the same name. “Everything I do is because of the popularity of that show,” Ted Danson said of the series during a […]
O’Brien, 61, joked that he and his crew were trying to figure out if Harrelson was still “alive” after the accident before noticing, “Your hand is wrapped up like somebody in a cartoon.”
“That’s because I wrapped it,” Danson revealed. “I wrapped it and I thought it looked funnier that way.”
The former costars had a good laugh about the unusual situation while Danson attended to Harrelson’s injuries. “We’re in the bathroom and I was like, ‘You played a doctor, right?’” Harrelson said in reference to Danson’s former title character Becker from the CBS comedy, which ran from 1998 to 2004. “He says, ‘Yeah, I also played a lawyer, so we could sue the guy.’”
Later, Harrelson joked about receiving medical attention from Danson, “It was weird when he asked me to disrobe.”
During their joint podcast appearance, Danson and Harrelson reflected on their long-standing friendship after meeting on the set of Cheers. The NBC sitcom ran from 1982 to 1993 and collectively won a whopping 28 Emmys during its 11 seasons.
Danson recalled the cast trying to mess with Harrelson when he joined Cheers during season 4.
“So it was more not, like, hazing him, we just wanted to kick his ass in anything we could find,” Danson said. “We started with basketball and as you later found out in life, he’s a really good basketball player, so he kicked our asses there.”
Harrelson went on to beat castmate Johnny Ratzenberger in wrestling, gave Danson a “bad elbow” after defeating him in arm wrestling and finally “killed” the rest of the cast at chess.
“So this is all in the first week really,” Danson said about their failed plans to poke fun at Harrelson. “So, from then on it was like, if you had some awful mean prank to pull, you would not waste it on anyone else except Woody. And he is, to this day, that’s Woody Harrelson.”