Ted Danson Says How He ‘Blew Up My Personal Life’ Kept Him from Being Typecast as After Cheers Exit

Ted Danson had not always had an easy relationship with his Cheers legacy.

Speaking with guest Charlie Day on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, the actor, 77, opened up about coping with being known as Sam Malone in the aftermath of the iconic series.

“First off, the transition was easy ’cause I blew my personal life up so badly in that moment of leaving that it didn’t even dawn on me that I had quite left Cheers for months ’cause I was just dealing with myself and my personal stuff,” Danson said.

“I think I left Cheers ’cause I went, ‘I’m blowing s— up in my life for the better,’ ” he continued.

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“I was changing for the better and working really hard at that, so I thought, ‘Might as well jump completely off the cliff.’ And [there was] a little bit of… if I don’t leave now, I may not know if I could do anything else and I wanna see if I can do any other stuff,” the Mr. Mayor star said.

Giving Day, 49, advice about moving on from a well-known character, Danson continued, “The whole typecasting thing is, I think in your hands, it’s not. You may, there are little bumps in the road where critics or people don’t want you to be what, anything else, ’cause they discovered you and love you how you are, kind of thing.”

“But if you don’t pay any attention to that and you just keep trying to be around the most creative people, and you’ve already done that, you’re working with directors like Guillermo del Toro, give me a break, Ethan Cohen,” the actor said. “And you’re directing yourself if you’re staying at such a high level, and from my vantage point of creativity, that’s not even something you should think about.”

Considering his experience in comparison to his costars’, Danson continued, “Sam Malone was… my job was to love every character in the bar. I regard unconditional love of everybody there, and that allowed the audience into that wacky world. That’s how [creator James] Burroughs described it. So… it was easier to not be Sam Malone than probably it was some of the other characters.”

Cheers ran for eleven seasons, from 1982 to 1993. Day has portrayed Charlie Kelly on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia since the show’s premiere in Aug. 2005 for 17 seasons and counting.