When Woody Harrelson ditched ‘Cheers’ to do “an extraordinary amount” of mushrooms instead
It’s no secret that Woody Harrelson has a soft spot for certain organic substances that create a natural high, even if he’s largely managed to keep his personal preferences separate from his professional life.
However, on one occasion, he and a couple of his co-stars ended up in serious trouble with the network when they decided to ditch a scheduled day’s filming on Cheers to hit the open seas and ingest an inordinate amount of magic mushrooms, which swore Ted Danson off them for life.
If there’s one cast member of the long-running sitcom who seems most likely to abandon their duties in favour of getting ridiculously high, then Harrelson’s is the only name at the top of that list. Unfortunately, he convinced Danson that it was a good idea, and it was an experience the actor would come to regret.
George Wendt was also there, but he made a point of avoiding the mushrooms, which worked out for the best, considering Danson was freaking the fuck out. The trio, along with Kesley Grammer, borrowed John Ratzenberger’s freshly purchased boat and off they went, leaving the production in the lurch.
“Woody turns to me and goes, ‘Have you ever had mushrooms?'” Danson recalled on their podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name. “I go, ‘No. No, I haven’t’. And he said, ‘Well, this will be a good time. We have nothing to do. We’ll be on a boat. We hadn’t had breakfast, so I was fairly hungry and ate, I think, an extraordinary amount of mushrooms.'”
Technically, they did have something to do, namely filming the latest episode in what was one of the biggest and most-watched shows on television throughout its run, but that didn’t matter when they’d decided to take an impromptu day off without permission and used it to get utterly wasted.
Danson admitted that when the shrooms kicked in, he started getting “more and more freaked out,” while it was clear this wasn’t Harrelson’s first rodeo. “I look at you, Woody, and you’re stretched out on a bunk, and I think, ‘Oh, he’s so used to this that he’s just cooling and relaxing,” he said. “I am panicking.”
The star confessed that at one point, he thought he was “dying,” which Harrelson corroborated. “He looked like a hologram of himself,” he laughed. “I thought you, really, you just weren’t breathing at all.” Was it worth ditching Cheers? According to Danson, no, because he called it “the worst four hours of my life.”
When they returned to the set the following day and tried to pretend as if they hadn’t just disappeared for a day of drug-fuelled nonsense, the network wasn’t having it. As Danson remembered, “They called us in, one at a time, to give us shit the next day,” with Harrelson confessing with the benefit of hindsight that “we shouldn’t have done that,” which was an understatement.
The funniest thing about it was that Grammer was conked out the entire time, and it’s clear from their vastly differing experiences that Harrelson had a much better trip, literally and figuratively, than Danson.
