Ted Danson said this week that he wants to “apologize forever” for doing blackface during a roast of former girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg in 1993.
“I would like to address this and apologize forever,” the “Cheers” star told W. Kamau Bell on his “Who’s With Me?” podcast on Wednesday.
He reiterated, “I have no problem talking about this, but I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet, you’re right, and go, ‘What the f—? Wow, I feel betrayed. I feel angry’ and whatever. And I did that.”
Danson said he was intimidated about roasting Goldberg at the Friars Club, whom he called one of the most “outrageous, funny Black women in the world at that point.”
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Knowing that he wasn’t a stand-up comedian, he decided he would go with “performance theater” for her roast.
He said during their relationship, the tabloids went after them for their interracial romance, saying, a White man and Black woman couldn’t be dating “because they liked each other or saw something in each other. It had to be sex. It had to be just pure sex, that’s the only reason for a relationship like this.”
In his mind, as he pondered what he would do for his performance, he thought: “If I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not. Then my mind went, ‘Well, I will do it in blackface.’”
He added that at the time he wanted to address what the tabloids had said about their relationship in his performance, but didn’t realize at the time it was getting “darker” and “angrier” and ended up having an “edge to it.”
Danson added that he had also “latched onto” a stand-up bit that Goldberg was doing at the time about not caring if people use the n-word because she felt that well-spoken people can be even more racist.
“I thought I could pull I could pull this off,” Danson scoffed. “I thought that this — there’s no one been Whiter than me in the world — that this White guy could have something valuable to say about, uh, race and race relations was so stupid and entitled.”
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The “Becker” actor explained that he thought he could be “Robin Williams. I can … step up and I can pull this off.”
“And that was so arrogant and stupid on my part,” he admitted. “So, off I go, using all this horrendous language describing our love affair while also in blackface.”
Danson revealed that he had run his plan for his performance by Goldberg, who he thinks maybe “didn’t want to squelch my creativity,” and had worked on it for months.
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“And within 20 seconds, I was like I stuck my finger in a light socket,” Danson revealed, adding that it felt like about 20% of the crowd “got” what he was doing and liked it, about 30% got it and hated it, and the rest “hated it and hated me. Yeah. And I kept going.”
Bell admitted that as a performer, just listening to Danson’s story was giving him “flop sweats.”
“I thought I was doing a satire on race relationships,” Danson said. “And I thought I was being edgy.”
In his defense, Bell pointed out that it was supposed to be a private event, but Danson said it had “left the room before I was over.”
By the time he got back to his hotel, he said he had to get on the phone with the mayor of New York City at the time, who hadn’t been in the room but had heard about it, and his manager said he couldn’t physically open his hotel room door because there were so many messages in front of it.
He said the stunt also frustrated his wife of more than 30 years, Mary Steenburgen, whom he married in 1995 and who he said has done much work on civil rights.
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The incident also resurfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement, Danson said, adding that he lost some corporate sponsorships, and it “scared” him.
“I am forever apologetic,” he said.
For the longest time, he said he would say, “I knew what my intention was. My intention was love. It doesn’t matter. Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters.”
“I thought I could run with the big boys and I couldn’t, and it was stupid, and it was not my place, and it was wrong, and it was hurtful,” he admitted.
Bell lauded Danson for his willingness to admit that he was wrong, adding that he experienced cancel culture before it had a name.
“And the fact that you even dealt with it in more recent years speaks to who you are, and why I would want to talk to you,” Bell said, adding that he found it even more “admirable” that Danson continues to be willing to discuss the incident “because most people don’t.”