Ted Danson is reflecting on a regrettable moment in his career.
The 78-year-old actor made an appearance on the Who’s With Me? podcast with W. Kamau Bell, where he spoke about doing Blackface during a roast of former partner Whoopi Goldberg at the New York Friars Club in 1993.
“I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet and go, ‘What the f–k? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that,” Ted reflected, noting that while their relationship was coming to an end, they had tried to get out of doing the roast together.
The event sold “so many tickets,” so the then-couple went forward with it anyway, he explained.
“So my brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world. And I’m supposed to be roasting her and I’m not a stand-up, I can’t run with the bulls. So I was like, ‘God, what am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well I can do performance theater.’ And I looked at all these tapes and it’s like, well if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not; then my mind went, I will do it in blackface and that will be funny or not, but it will be like, ‘I have license now.’ … I thought I could pull this off,” Ted said of the decision.
He regretted thinking a “white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations,” and called it “so arrogant and stupid on my part.”
“Within 20 seconds, I was like, ‘I stuck my finger in a light socket’…I thought I was doing a satire on mixed relationships, and I thought I was being edgy,” he admitted.
“Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters. And if you haven’t thought through that, then you need to. 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 … So I apologize again to anyone who’s listening, that I was arrogant enough to think that I had something to offer,” Ted apologized.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully. So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again,” he added. Watch him explain above.
He also just opened up about his health, revealing that he had a recent health scare that “humbled” him.
Posted To:Ted Danson Whoopi Goldberg
