Ted Danson Shares His Unexpected Celebrity Doppelganger, Notes, 'We Don't Look Anything Alike!'
The 'Cheers' star says fans have often confused him for the actor
Frank Carroll/NBC via Getty; Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Tony Danza on 'Taxi' (left); Ted Danson on 'Cheers' (right).Ted Danson has a slightly surprising celebrity doppelganger: Tony Danza.
The Cheers star, 76, revealed on the Thursday, Nov. 21, episode of the Jennifer Hudson Show that he was often mistaken for Danza, 73, in the 1980s.
“We don’t look anything alike,” Danson told Hudson, 43, while using his hands to also show their height difference. The confusion was seemingly all in the similarity of their names, he added.
“The first time it happened to me, I was in New York, and a bunch of constructor workers, I walk by and they go, ‘Hey, Tony.’ And I don’t look around because my name’s Ted,” he said. “And they go, ‘Tony! Tony Danza! What are you, too good for us now?' ”
Danson joked that he still ignored them to get some heat on Danza. He also shared that he once signed an autograph with Danza’s name. “People, fame, whatever,” he concluded as Hudson laughed.
The mix-up was probably in part because Danson and Danza both became sitcom stars around the same time. Danson began appearing as Sam on Cheers in 1982, while Danza’s Taxi began in 1978. His second major series, Who’s the Boss, premiered in 1984.
Danson stars in the new Netflix series A Man on the Inside, in which he plays a retired person turned amateur private investigator who goes undercover in a retirement community. Speaking to PEOPLE earlier this month, the actor said he’s just as happy working now as he was decades ago.
“I feel the same joy I did in my late 20s when I drove through the studio gate,” he said. Seeing his fellow actors and the crew and security guards “makes me very happy, which is why I think I work a lot," the two-time Emmy winner explained.
Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix
Ted Danson in 'A Man on the Inside.'"I'm not sure how good I am; it doesn't matter. It makes me so happy to be doing this,“ he added. In recent years, Danson has also starred in the series The Good Place and Mr. Mayor.
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He added that his age is an asset when working on new projects. “One of my joys, and I've been able to do it in life several times, is to use my age and what I'm going through in life and explore that,” he said. “What is it like to be 76 and be funny, trying to be funny? What does that feel like? Oh my God, my greatest joy is to be funny possibly in every possible way I can.”
