Ted Danson reveals the ‘Cheers’ cast targeted Woody Harrelson: ‘We wanted to kick his ass’
nypost.com“Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” with former co-star Ted Danson, who revealed that the cast of the beloved sitcom series, most of whom were in their 30s at the time, were hard on then-24-year-old Harrelson when he joined the show.“Thirty-seven is when you realize you’re no longer 25 or 24,” said Danson, 76, in a clip from the interview released June 13.“So it was more not like hazing him, we just wanted to kick his ass in anything we could find,” the actor added. “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.”Danson was referencing how Harrelson showed off his basketball skills in the 1992 movie “White Men Can’t Jump.”The “Damages” actor continued: “I have a vision of Johnny Ratzenberger, who played Cliff, out on the lawn by the stage doing, you know, the leg wrestling where you’re both on your back, and you try to flip the other guy with just your leg.”“Johnny’s strong,” Harrelson interjected. “John’s strong and got some thighs on him,” Danson said, adding, “Woody kicked his ass.
I literally have a bad elbow to this day cause I wouldn’t give up arm wrestling. I did finally give up, because he was kicking my butt.
So then we moved to chess.”Danson said that the cast thought they could beat Harrelson “mentally,” but they couldn’t be more wrong.“Killed us at chess,” he recalled. “So this is all in the first week really.
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.”Harrelson joined the cast of “Cheers” in Season 4.
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