Ted Danson said he will “apologize for the rest of my life” over a roast of Whoopi Goldberg he did in blackface in 1993.
Speaking on W. Kamau Bell’s podcast “Who’s With Me?,” the “Cheers” and “The Good Place” actor opened up about the incident, which occurred at the New York Friars Club while he was romantically linked with Goldberg. Danson’s roast at the private event included racial slurs and jokes about the pair’s sex life, which drew backlash from those in attendance as well as public figures like David N. Dinkins, New York City’s first Black mayor.
“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 fuck? Wow, I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that,” Danson said.
He admitted that their affair was coming to an end and they had tried to get out of the roast, but it wasn’t possible because the Friars Club had “sold so many tickets.”
“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?’” Danson said. “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.”
Danson expressed regret that he thought “this white guy could have something valuable to say about race and race relations,” calling it “so arrogant and stupid on my part.” He said he realized immediately during the roast that he was in the wrong. “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.”
Danson said his justification “for the longest time” was that his intentions were not malicious, but he told Bell that he’s now realized it “doesn’t matter.”
“Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” he said. “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.”
Danson also offered another apology to Goldberg for drudging the story up again, saying: “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.”
At the time, Goldberg defended Danson to the press, saying that she had written much of the material. “We were not trying to be politically correct. We were trying to be funny for ourselves,” she said in a statement.
A representative for Goldberg did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment.
Watch Danson’s full interview on “Who’s With Me?” below.