Dick Van Dyke Lobbies for Cameo on Ted Danson’s ‘Man on the Inside’
With production kicking off for Season Two of Ted Danson’s Netflix comedy, Man on the Inside, hungry young actors are throwing their hats in the ring for a chance to costar on the show. One thespian who’s knocking on Danson’s door? Ninety-nine-year-old Dick Van Dyke.
Even though Van Dyke is pushing 100, he’s not ready to give up acting. “I love what I do for a living,” he recently told People, suggesting that Danson’s show would be the perfect fit. “Yeah, I’m a big fan of Ted’s,” Van Dyke said at a recent Dick & Arlene Van Dyke Present Vandy Camp event. “And the show’s good.”
Prediction: If Van Dyke wants a cameo on Danson’s comedy about an aging private eye, it’s as good as done. Danson hasn’t been shy about how his favorite comic actor introduced him to television. “Dick Van Dyke has always been one of my heroes,” he told Men’s Journal in 2018. “I grew up without a television, but when I was a freshman in college, I bought this old black-and-white console. I crawled up on the roof, patched into a teacher’s antenna, and snuck back into my room. What came on was one of the first reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1967 — I was hooked.”
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According to Danson, he’d stalk Van Dyke at parties and awards shows, pestering him for stories about his old sitcom days. “He runs from me when he sees me because I almost tackle and hug him to death,” he confessed.
An appearance on Man on the Inside would be the next chapter for the two actors since Van Dyke played Danson’s father on Becker. “I think the rest of the cast absolutely sucked that week because we never got to rehearse,” Danson remembered when Van Dyke appeared on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “We just asked you questions. Tell us more stories, tell us more stories.”
“I never saw him more excited, more moved, more honored than the week he got to work with you,” Danson’s wife, Mary Steenbergen, told Van Dyke.
In other words, if Van Dyke wants to be on a Danson TV show? Book it, done deal. There is one potential snag, however. “If it’s traveling, that’s the hard part,” Van Dyke said. “I’m too old to travel and all that.”
“If they come to our house,” suggested his wife Arlene, “he will work all the time.”
Considering that Danson and Steenbergen traveled to Casa de Van Dyke for their podcast collaboration (as did Coldplay for their recent music video), chances are good that the Man on the Inside writers could cook up a scene that takes place in a 99-year-old comedian’s living room.
