Mary Steenburgen Assumed Ted Danson Was Just Like ‘Cheers’ Sam Malone

Mary Steenburgen definitely had the wrong impression of her future husband Ted Danson before they started dating. When they first met, the self-described Cheers fan just assumed Danson must be “slick” like Sam Malone. She was disavowed of that notion after they got together in a romantic way. “My joke is that slick guys don’t say, ‘Gosharooney!’ after making love,” she revealed on a recent episode of Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast.  

Danson wasn’t expecting that reveal, apologizing to his stepchildren for that intimate look inside their bedroom. “Nice,” he replied. “I wasn’t setting that one up, but that’s great. Sorry, kids.”

But Steenburgen had a good reason to believe Danson had something in common with the preening Malone. The two met when the actress was being considered for a part in the movie Pontiac Moon. She showed up to meet director Peter Madak and Danson, where she was shocked by his long, flowing locks (courtesy of extensions he was wearing for the comedy Getting Even With Dad).

“You’re walking ahead of me, and you’re tossing your fake hair as you walk through the restaurant," Steenburgen remembered. “You were so attached and so proud of it. And I just remember that my first thought of you, besides adoring you on Cheers, was, ‘Well, this is the most ridiculous creature I’ve ever met.’”

“And from that moment on, folks, I had her,” Danson joked.

Eventually, Danson changed Steenburgen’s mind. “You’d come to work, and you had paint all over your clothes because you were doing these little paintings,” she explained. “And I just kept thinking, Wow, he’s not who I pictured.”  

The big moment in their courtship, said Danson, was a four-mile canoe ride. “We came back not just friends,” he swooned. “I think we pulled over and kissed and then got back into the canoe. And I was smitten. I was a goner at that point.”

Things were going so well that Steenburgen eventually had to tell her ex-husband of 10 years, actor Malcolm McDowell. That wasn’t necessarily going to be easy. “He hadn’t exactly loved people I’d gone out with after our divorce,” she confessed. “And he could be kind of obvious about it.”

But once things started to take off with Danson, she wanted to tell McDowell “quite early on so he wouldn't hear it from somebody else. And I said, ‘I know you haven’t liked people I’ve gone out with, but the person I’m seeing now is someone I know you like.’”

McDowell wanted to know who it was this time. “And I said, ‘It’s Ted Danson.’” Her ex, as it turns out, was a fellow Cheers fan. “And he goes, ‘Oh, shit.’ Because he didn’t really know you, but he admired you so much as an actor.”

Now it sounds like one big happy family. “He has been nothing but loving and kind,” Danson said. “I adore him. I really do. We’re very lucky.” 

Gosharooney!