Ted Danson has vowed to “apologise forever” for his 1993 blackface stunt at his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg’s roast, calling the decision “stupid.”
The Cheers star regretfully reflected on the incident during his June 3 appearance on W. Kamau Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast, praising Goldberg for her handling of the incident before owning up to his “arrogant” mistake.
“Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully,” he began. “So the last thing she probably wants to do is be put in this position again.”
“I need to and want to apologise for the rest of my life,” Danson said on the podcast. “I know what was in my heart, so I have no problem talking about this. But I need to and want to apologise 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.”
At the time, his relationship with Goldberg was slowly ending, and while they tried to get out of the roast, the Friars Club (which hosted the event) threatened to sue them if they dropped out because they “had sold so many tickets.”
The actor explained that his intention was to pull an over-the-top stunt to keep up with the comedians in the room.
“So my brain was going, ‘OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world, at that point. And I’m supposed to be roasting her and I’m not a stand-up, I can’t run with the bulls. I’m an actor at best,’” he said. “So I was like, ‘God, what am I gonna do?’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I can do performance theatre.’”
“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,’” Danson continued.
Danson noted how during this time, he and the Color Purple star were constantly receiving negative comments in the press over their interracial relationship.
“It couldn’t be because they liked each other or saw something in each other … It had to be just pure sex, that’s the only reason for a relationship like this,” he said.
He specifically “latched on to” Goldberg’s remarks that she didn’t care about people using the n-word, because you didn’t need “nasty language” to be racist.
“It had a real f***ing edge to it,” he recalled of the bit.
“I thought I could pull this off. I thought that, there’s no one been whiter than me in the world, that this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations was so stupid and entitled. I thought, ‘Oh, I can be Robin Williams. I can step up, and I can pull this off. I know it’s bold, but I can pull this off.’ And that was so arrogant and stupid on my part.”
But despite working “for months” on the bit, things quickly went wrong “within 20 seconds” of his performance.
“It was like I stuck my finger in a light socket,” he recalled.
At the time, Goldberg defended Danson’s blackface bit after it received public backlash.
“We were not trying to be politically correct. We were trying to be funny for ourselves,” Goldberg said in a 1993 press conference, per Deseret News. She also admitted to writing most of Danson’s jokes and hiring the artist who painted him in blackface.
The View co-host also read a statement from Danson that read: “There was too much love behind my words to ever be misconstrued as racist.”
This article originally appeared in Page Six and was reproduced with permission.
