Ted Danson has revealed that he had the "worst hours of his life" when he took mushrooms while on a boat with his Cheers cast mates.
On the August 14 episode of their podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Danson (who played Sam Malone) and Woody Harrelson (Woody Boyd) were joined by their former costar George Wendt, who played Norm Peterson on the beloved sitcom.
During the episode, the trio remembered a day when they decided to ditch filming Cheers because it was "a very female-heavy" shoot day. Instead, they got on costar John Ratzenberger's (Cliff Clavin) boat—and experimented with hallucinogenics.
Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Danson for comment on Thursday.
"Woody turns to me and goes, 'Have you ever had mushrooms?' 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,'" Danson said.
"And we hadn't had breakfast, so I was fairly hungry and ate I think an extraordinary amount of mushrooms," he continued, as Harrelson and Wendt laughed. "And then and then I'm thinking 'Oh this is all right.'"
Unfortunately for Danson, things were not all right for long, as when they were halfway to Catalina they faced dangerous leftover waves from a hurricane in Mexico.
He added: "So people not on mushrooms would be seasick pretty much but I sat there getting more and more and more freaked out and whatever it is— you get stoned or whatever it is on mushrooms—and 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 it and relaxing.' And I, I am panicking, I'm having trouble breathing."
The actor then decided to "go up top" thinking that would help him feel better. He said when he sat down next to Wendt, his costar instantly knew something was up.
"You looked at me and you went, 'You're high on something aren't you?' [I] kind of nodded sheepishly and John was like, 'Oh for crying out loud.' But you spent the next 45 minutes poking me about every minute or two and said 'Breathe' 'cos I would literally forget to breathe and feel like I was dying and then you would poke me," Danson explained, calling Wendt a "lifesaver."
When Harrelson eventually joined them on the upper deck, Danson said that in his eyes, his costar looked "skeletal."
"You looked like Woody the skeleton in my eyes. That was my only kind of visual buzz from mushrooms," he recalled.
Harrelson added: "You did look like a hologram of yourself ... I thought you really–you just weren't breathing at all. You never let any air into your lungs."
While Wendt said he did not join them in taking the drugs, he was "seasick" on the way back due to the rough waves.
"It was the worst four hours of my life," Danson said.
Wendt went on to say that the group "were in such trouble" afterward for playing hooky, which is when you skip school or work without telling anyone.
"I didn't think anyone would give a s***," he said, as Danson added: "They called us in, one at a time, to give a s*** the next day."
However, Harrelson understood why they did, saying: "Well it was fair, we shouldn't have done that."
"No, but we'd been perfect for six, seven years ... Their complaint was, 'You should have told us. We would have let you.' And it was like, that's not hooky," Danson said.
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