Earlier this year, the actress Mary Steenburgen began filming the second season of a popular Netflix show. The role, a love interest for the protagonist, promised fantastic outfits, a brief nude scene, a show stopping musical number, a tuba. At 72, having survived the loss of parents and friends, Steenburgen has learned to treasure opportunities like these.
“I don’t see life as endless anymore,” she said, her eyes wet. “So these lovely things that come to you, you have such intense gratitude. That’s the big thing about this moment in time: It’s insane gratitude.”
Her husband and co-star, the actor Ted Danson, 77, turned to her with love and sympathy and murmured, “This is when you say, ‘Top that.’”
Steenburgen obliged him. “Top that, sucker,” she said.
This was over lunch on a chilly afternoon in Manhattan, the week before Thanksgiving. Steenburgen and Danson, who live in Los Angeles, had flown east to promote “A Man on the Inside,” the Netflix comedy. Danson (“Cheers,” “The Good Place”) stars as Charles Nieuwendyk, a retired professor of engineering who pursues a second career as an investigator.
Season 2, now streaming, finds him undercover at a Bay Area liberal arts college. He quickly falls for a sultry music professor named Mona Margadoff, played by Steenburgen (“Justified,” the “Book Club” films).
“She’s stunning and funny, talented, brilliant and gorgeous and sexy,” Charles enthuses to his friend Calbert, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.
This scene is one of many moments when the boundary between the Danson-Steenburgen relationship and the Charles-Mona one feels whisper thin. Steenburgen and Danson, the joint recipients of this year’s Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the Emmys, are 30 years married and famously in love. The parents of four children (two each, from earlier marriages) and as many grandchildren, they have spent decades devoting themselves to social and environmental issues, and to each other.
“It’s miraculous,” Danson, a self-described “wife guy,” said of their real-life relationship. “It felt divine that we got together.”
That feeling was, even in the awkward confines of an interview, indisputable in a way that makes even mild cynics (mild cynics like me, anyway) believe again in love.
“In the parlance of the youth, it’s goals,” Michael Schur, the creator of “A Man on the Inside,” said of their relationship. “Their life together, professionally and personally, everything about the way they move through the world is like, man, if I could be doing that when I am their age, I will consider myself to be a very lucky person.”
Though Danson and Steenburgen have worked together often over the years (“We don’t like being apart,” Danson explained), “A Man on the Inside” is the rare show that allows them to inhabit that love in a full-body way, to make each other light in the heart and weak in the knees for the camera and beyond.
“I’m just smitten,” Danson said of Charles’s feelings for Mona. “It’s the same way I was smitten with Mary.”
Danson and Steenburgen first met, briefly, in the early 1980s, during auditions for the movie “Cross Creek.” Steenburgen had already been cast, and Danson was brought in to audition for the role of her husband. Steenburgen’s first impression: He was too handsome. Her second: He was also pretty funny. Peter Coyote was cast instead.
Over the years, involved with other people, they ran into each other once or twice more. Then they met again to make the 1994 film “Pontiac Moon.”
Initially, Steenburgen wasn’t so impressed. Danson showed up wearing hair extensions, a relic of a previous project. “I just thought, that’s the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met,” she recalled.
“Ridiculous is your sweet spot,” Danson said. This, Steenburgen agreed, was true. She thought Danson would be like his TV characters, a womanizer, a rascal. “But I was wrong,” she said, adding an anecdote that would embarrass their grandchildren: “Slick TV guys don’t say ‘gosharoonie’ after making love.”
The movie wasn’t anything spectacular. (“The journey feels long enough for a real trip to the moon,” The New York Times said.) And neither of them feels that they were very good in it. But by the time it wrapped, they were in love. They married the next year.
They’ve played opposite each other plenty since, often in comedies. “Both of us are laughter junkies,” Steenburgen explained.
They appeared together in a couple of TV movies, on the CBS newspaper comedy “Ink,” on the HBO hipster P.I. show “Bored to Death.” They played fictionalized versions of themselves on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“I’ve never seen a couple with more joy between them, more love between them,” said Jeff Garlin, a “Curb” co-star. One plotline called for the fictional Ted to divorce the fictional Mary, and Garlin could see that it genuinely upset Danson.
“He was really sad about it, so sad that she was no longer his wife in a fictional world,” Garlin said. Danson wasn’t alone: His publicist had to assure disconsolate viewers that the couple was still together in real life.
The actress Jane Fonda has observed that same bond — she worked with Steenburgen on the “Book Club” movies and was briefly arrested with Danson during a climate protest. (“The champagne of arrests!” Danson crowed.)
“When May and Ted are together, you’re looking at true love,” Fonda said in an email. “They complete each other and inspire each other.”
In 2016, Danson was cast to lead Schur’s big-swing philosophical comedy, “The Good Place.” In the finale, he and Steenburgen share a brief scene, in which she played Danson’s guitar teacher.
“We just thought, who’s better to play that role?” Schur said during an interview at the Netflix offices. “Because of how much he talks about how much he owes her and how much he’s learned from her.”
“The Good Place” ended in 2020, and Schur and Danson reunited last year for “A Man on the Inside.” But Schur didn’t see a role for Steenburgen in the first season, when the widowed Charles infiltrates an assisted living facility. A familiar face would have worked against that story line. But for Season 2, in which Charles seemed ready to introduce love back into his life, Steenburgen was the obvious choice.
“He’s never happier than when she’s there,” Schur said of Danson.
The role of Mona was made-to-measure for Steenburgen. Mona is flakier and quirkier — Charles describes her as “a sexy cuckoo clock” — but they share a love of music. (Steenburgen contributed to Mona’s big number, “Goodbye Baby.”) And Mona reflects some of what Schur described as Steenburgen’s cheerful existentialism.
“She is a very buoyant person — she just always seems like she’s grateful and happy to be wherever she is,” Schur said of Steenburgen. “So it was a nice dovetailing of what the character needed and who the actress was.”
Falling in love onscreen didn’t require much in the way of acting. “It’s a seamless relationship between who they are to each other and their characters,” said Henderson, who appears in both seasons of the series. In the show, Danson and Steenburgen are acting — and they’re good at it! — but their delight in each other seems to transcend character. There’s a sweetness to them that would be intolerable in almost any other couple. Yet they are mindful of their great good fortune and keen to share it. The sweetness doesn’t cloy.
The season ends ambiguously for Charles and Mona, but Schur believes she might return. “If we want Ted to be happy, we will figure out a way to bring her back,” he said. In the meantime, there was this new season to promote, children and grandchildren to care for, the occasional ocean or stray dog to save.
“There’s not a second you’re taking it for granted,” Steenburgen said. Top that.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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