“Worst day of my life”: the only time Ted Danson chose getting high on mushrooms over acting
The list of actors to have experimented with drugs is long enough to stretch to the Moon and back, but ditching his day job to get high on mushrooms was an experience Ted Danson instantly regretted.
While it’s about as unprofessional as it gets, countless thespians have nonetheless turned up on set under the influence of various narcotics and managed to get the job done, but Danson couldn’t bring himself to do that. Instead, he was convinced to skip out on a day’s work and spend it getting out of his mind instead.
Inevitably, it landed him in the bad books with the higher-ups, as you’d expect when the biggest star of the biggest show on television decides to have an impromptu day off, leaving the rest of the cast and crew in the lurch. Well, not all of them, since he had a couple of Cheers buddies along for the ride.
If you were to guess which of the sitcom’s featured players was the most likely to be armed to the teeth with magic mushrooms and exert a bad influence over their older and supposed to be more sensible colleagues, you’d probably point to Woody Harrelson as the most likely and obvious candidate.
Shockingly, you’d be right, with the erstwhile Woody Boyd convincing Danson to take a literal and figurative trip that he’d never consider making again. “I’ll tell you about the worst day of my life,” the latter recalled, with the actor calling in sick on Cheers to meet Harrelson and George Wendt, who had a boat.
“Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, ‘You want to try some mushrooms?'” Danson explained. “I’d never had them, so I’m handed this bag, and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I thought we were going to die for three hours.”
Harrelson, who was also off his tits, was growing increasingly concerned about just how fucked up his friend was getting. “It looked like his face was melting,” he remembered, but then again, that might have just been a hallucination, since he’d also snaffled enough mushrooms to smell colours.
Even though they’d met at the marina where his boat was docked, and subsequently used it to hit the open water for their mushroom-infused misadventure, Wendt still tried to shift the blame. “We got into serious trouble for that,” he admitted. “We did it because Ted was doing it. He’s sort of a reluctant leader. He didn’t try to flex his influence, he’s just eminently followable.”
The trio let down everyone involved in Cheers, who were notified at the last minute that they wouldn’t be showing up on set, and all Danson had to show for it at the end of the day was the feeling that he’d gotten so high he might die, and it goes without saying that he never chose drugs over acting again.
