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Ted Danson Surveys Damages
February 5, 2008

“It feels a little like Damages has turned me back to the reasons I became an actor,” Ted Danson told me in an interview last week, speaking of his role on the acclaimed F/X television show, The Complete First Season of which was released last week by Sony.

 

There’s no denying that Danson’s role as Arthur Frobisher is a juicy one. A businessman who is facing charges of having sold his company while dumping his stock for billions and leaving his employees penniless, Frobisher was found “not guilty” in a government trial. The civil trial isn’t looking nearly as good for Frobisher, though, which prompts him to take some drastic and dirty action over the course of the season.

 

“I figure this guy is arrogant and narcissistic and the idea of narcissism isn’t foreign to me. Yes, he does

something bad, but I can understand it,” said Danson. “Playing my kind of role, you don’t know what you were going to do next. In one-eighth of a page in the second episode, [Frobisher] is in the bag of a limo with a hooker doing cocaine and plotting someone’s murder. Now that’s a character who takes a big left turn!”

 

The veteran TV and film actor is quick to declare that the loser restrictions on the cable channel F/X are one of the key reasons that show is so critically, commercially and personally satisfying.

 

“By far, Damages is more filmic than other TV work I’ve done. Cable gives you leeway that networks have. F/X is known to be slightly edgy – it’s hard to be edgy on network TV,” said Danson. “And you attract really interesting writers because they have more room to move around in this kind of environment.”

 

“Really good acting becomes nearly effortless when there’s really good writing,” he added.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on February 5, 2008 | Comments (0)