Ted Danson on The Good Place's finale: I got to experience sadness along with my character

Entertainment Weekly

"First off, we had the luxury of knowing that we were saying goodbye for the entire year that we were shooting the show," Danson tells EW. "Mike (Schur) knew that he would have told the story by the end of the season, and he didn’t want to vamp, he wanted to do it the way he envisioned it from the very beginning. So that was lovely. You got to be sad in real time and appreciate and celebrate the fact that we are all together doing this amazing show, because a lot of times you get cancelled when you thought you were going to be back. So the actual goodbye was not as sad. For me, the sadness of the actor and the sadness of the character saying goodbye kind of coincided, so it was kind of this wonderful, sweet, sad acting and also, you know, real life. By the time we watched the final show and did that whole final episode thing, it was just sweet, it wasn’t really even sad. The takeaway — there are so many little messages or thoughts about how the universe works. And I have to say that I walked away going — and I heard some other people say — 'I sure hope that’s the way the universe works.' Because you don’t know. And that’s the wonderful, sad, and exciting thing about being human. And it’s probably the reason why we have faith, because you had to live your life not knowing but having faith that certain things might be true."

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