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Mary Steenburgen expressed her support for her husband of 31 years, Ted Danson, after he issued a heartfelt apology for wearing blackface to roast his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg at the Friar’s Club in 1993.
Steenburgen appeared on Obsessed: The Podcast, where she shared her reaction to Danson’s conversation with comedian W. Kamau Bell. During his appearance on the Who’s With Me? podcast, Danson told Bell, “I need to and want to apologize for the rest of my life because somebody today can go on the internet, you’re right, and go, ‘What the f---?’”
He also explained that the stunt was supposed to call attention to the nasty tabloid coverage that Goldberg and Danson received as an interracial couple at the time.
Describing the way their relationship was categorized by the media, Danson said, “It couldn’t be because they liked each other or saw something in each other. It had to be sex. It had to be just pure sex. That’s the only reason for a relationship like this.”
“I was happy for my husband that they got to have that conversation together,” Steenburgen said of Danson and Bell. It was “a choice he made a long time ago,” she continued, “which for him was partly about showing up for someone he cared about, and also trying to make a comment in a sort of dramatic way about race.”
Danson told Bell that Steenburgen didn’t always understand where he was coming from when he made that “choice.”
“Over the years, because I have to throw Mary into this because it affects Mary, that I’m saying this, Mary was sweet and gentle with me, but early on, just couldn’t understand,” Danson explained. “She had done all this work, civil rights work, and this and that, and she couldn’t understand it. So I don’t think that anyone associated with me got it.”
The couple got married in 1995, just two years after the incident occurred.
Steenburgen said she now understands what “Ted was trying to do.” It was “a piece of theater, almost, that was a comment on how those two people and their relationship were constantly being judged in terms of Black and white,” she said. “And they had some pretty rough stuff come at them before that.”
The actor’s wife added, “He was trying to say what a horrible thing that we judge each other in this way. He says that he will always need to apologize for it. He doesn’t think there’s a moment where he should stop. And I leave most of the explanation of it to him, but I was proud of him.”
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