GRAND Magazine- Winter 2020 - 20

cover story
always be here. It allowed us to be in the moment, cherishHow do you take care of yourself physically?
ing each other, knowing we'd not always be here. The last
Ted: Get to your doctor sooner rather than later because day was emotional, but it was coming all year.
a small problem can become a big problem. I am a hypochondriac - but psoriatic arthritis is genuine enough to
The life and times of Ted Danson
get your attention. The difference between feeling victimOn the Ellen show, Ted exclaimed, "My wife (Mary
ized and being a victim is when you turn that around and
Steenburgen) is the best grandmother on the planet! She
say, I'm going to take care of myself. I feel empowered, I'm passionately loves being a grandmother. It's astounding! It
going to take care of it. That empowerment induces health really is! It's like you get to eat every dessert in the world
and well-being.
and not get fat. It's just brilliant! You get to be sixty-nine
years old and parts of your body ache and you get a little
Did you take anything with you from the set in The
grumpy, then grandkids come along and it's like...Oh I got
Good Place?
it! I'm fine! I'm in! Thank you, Lord, thank you!"
Ted: I've doing press for the last 2-3 days so I took three
According to his interview with Closer, Ted Danson and
suits. I did! Toward the end - spoiler alert - my character
Mary Steenburgen had both pretty much given up on love
is given a wallet and it has all the pictures of the humans
by the time they filmed 1994's Pontiac Moon together.
in it. I said I want that. I'm not big on memorabilia - if I
take memorabilia, my brain goes, "That's the most importLife is messy. The older I get,
ant part of my life, it's downhill." I didn't take a mug from
the more I realize it's okay to be
Cheers, but I am going to keep this wallet because it has
my friends, the actors.
imperfect. Because you can still grow

Ted Danson and wife, Mary Steenburgen, beaming together
at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

20 GRAND

JAN., FEB. & MAR. 2020

What was it like on the last day of filming The Good
Place?
Ted: We were blessed. Usually, you're told an hour
before that you were cancelled and you're not going to
come back. We were blessed because the creator of our
show [Michael Schur] is a thoughtful, decent, amazing
man who's writing about what it is to be decent. He realized in essence what The Good Place is - here's a thought,
a "maybe" on how the universe works. He realized by the
end of this year he would have told that story, so vamping
just to stay on the air would be the opposite of what that
show was about. We had a year to know that we wouldn't

and make changes in your life.

"I announced to all my friends - not dramatically, but
very seriously - that I was done with relationships," Mary
told Closer this July. The 2018 Emmy nominee, who'd
recently divorced second wife Casey Coates and endured
a very public breakup with Whoopi Goldberg, had felt
similarly.
But shooting a five-hour canoe scene as husband and
wife helped turn fiction into fact.
"We paddled in sync," he remembered. "We went
out as friends and by the time we came back, we were in

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GRAND Magazine- Winter 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of GRAND Magazine- Winter 2020