A Man on the Inside” star Ted Danson on aging: “Don’t slow down, just keep going, keep living your life

Sitting down to talk about his new TV show, Ted Danson admits he is nervous. Why? “Because I want people to see it, I really do,” he said. “I think it’s an important conversation.”

It’s strange to think of Danson as nervous about anything, but in this case, it’s not hard to see why: his latest project means a lot to him, about a subject that touches everyone. In the new Netflix series “A Man on the Inside,” Danson is a recently-retired widower without much to do, until he answers an ad from a private investigator, and becomes a mole inside a nursing home.

Like a lot of TV series, the premise seems a little far-fetched, but this one’s true: it’s based on “The Mole Agent,” a 2020 documentary about a real-life 83-year-old who goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home looking for signs of patients being mistreated. What the documentary found was a group of elderly people fighting loneliness and loss with heart and humor.

“A Man on the Inside” is no different, says series creator Mike Schur. “I would say the purpose of this show is simply to discuss a subject that very few people discuss, which is aging,” said Schur. “It’s this subject that we just don’t like to talk about. It’s thought of in this country (I think more than other countries) as something almost shameful or embarrassing.”

“If you’re dying, you somehow made a mistake,” said Danson.

“You screwed up! Yeah, you screwed up, you got old, you know?” Schur said. “And I think that’s weird, because this is what happens if we’re lucky. If we’re lucky, we get old!”

At 76, Danson himself is aging gracefully, with an attitude inspired by a Hollywood legend: Jane Fonda. “She was turning 80, and at 70 I was starting to go, ‘Well, I’d better look for a nice place to land, you know, this life plane,’ or whatever,” he said. “And I looked at her and it was like, no. She has her foot on the gas pedal! She’s, like, doing a 12-hour day, shooting her show, jumping on a bus to go, you know, support the service industry in Sacramento with a handful of women.

“Don’t slow down, just keep going, keep living your life. I think that’s one of the things our elders can pass on to us. This is how you live life right up until the end.”

Seems like Danson’s elders set a good example: his parents wouldn’t allow a TV in their home. “My mother didn’t like them,” he said. “She’d rather you read, or go out and play, or be creative.”

But then, Danson got famous, on TV.  His parents finally got one. “But they put kind of this beautiful tapestry over the front of it, so when you walked in their house, you didn’t see a TV, you saw this beautiful tapestry with a candle on top, and they would take it off and watch ‘Cheers,'” he said.

Danson still credits his success today to that one show about a Boston bar. But since he hung up his bartender apron in 1993, he’s been in hit after hit. He was the title character in “Becker.” In “Damages,” he held his own with Glenn Close. He went to heaven and hell in “The Good Place.” And he’s even played himself in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Along the way Danson has used his fame to draw attention to his passion project, Oceana, an organization dedicated to preserving the world’s oceans. Asked if he feels they have made progress, he replied, “Yes. I mean, our focus is fishing, over-fishing, making sure that the fisheries of the world are healthy. Because if done right, you could feed a billion people a fish meal every day.”

That sounds a little like a miracle – something he touches on in his new show, and something he says he lives with every day.

Asked what are the miracles in his life, Danson replied, “Mary Steenburgen is, you know, literally heaven-sent. I did some work on myself for about a year before I met her, after ‘Cheers,’ becoming emotionally mature and real. And I worked hard at it. And then along came Mary Steenburgen. … We are so blessed. To love somebody and to be loved, is just one of those heaven-on-earth miracles, you know? And that came with Mary.”

And the idea Ted Danson is hoping to share with his latest project is that miracles can be found in any life, right up until the very end. “This is your life,” he said, “not just up to, you know, 65 and then you retire and are going down. No, you get to live right up until you don’t live. And it’s your life. It’s such a gift. Explore it, and be excited about it. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, there’s grief. Yes, there’s all of that. But embrace it. Embrace it, is kind of what I think the message of the show is. It’s what I hope I live with.”

He got emotional sharing that. “I’m just emotional ’cause I finally said something I wanted to say!” he laughed.

To watch a trailer for “A Man on the Inside,” click on the video player below:

      
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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Steven Tyler.