The actor apologized again for the 1993 incident

Actor Ted Danson has said he will "apologize for the rest of his life" for his appearance in blackface at Whoopi Goldberg's 1993 Friars Club Roast.

The actor known for the series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" appeared on an episode of the podcast "Who's With Me?", where he said he felt the need to continue to sincerely apologize.

“Because someone can go online today and say, ‘What the hell is this? I feel betrayed, I feel angry.’ And I did that,” Danson said.

His performance at the event caused immediate backlash among attendees, including then-Mayor of New York City David Dinkins. His speech included racial slurs and jokes about his then-girlfriend, Goldberg.

Speaking about the circumstances leading up to the performance, Danson explained that their relationship was coming to an end at the time and that he tried to back out of the "roast" (a form of comedy event in which one person is the center of attention and friends, colleagues, comedians, or acquaintances publicly tease, mock, and make jokes about them), but the Friars Club threatened to sue him.

Recalling the situation with a laugh, he said the reason was that the organizers had already sold a large number of tickets.

"I'll explain what was going through my mind at the time, not as an excuse," he said.

"I was thinking, 'Here's one of the funniest and most provocative black women in the world. I need to roast her, and I'm not a stand-up comedian,'" he recalled, adding that he then came up with the idea of ​​doing the show as a kind of performance.

“I was watching all the footage and I thought, ‘If I were black, I could say all these provocative things.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll do it in blackface and it’ll be funny – or it won’t – but it’ll give me some kind of license,’” he added.

He also recalled that he relied in part on earlier statements by Goldberg, who at one point said that the mere use of derogatory words is not what determines whether someone is racist.

“I thought I could pull it off properly,” he said.

"There is no whiter man than me. For me to think I had anything valuable to say about race relations was stupid and an expression of privilege," the actor continued.

During the months of preparing the material, he discussed the idea with Goldberg, but he believes she did not want to interfere with his creative process.

When the performance began, the reactions were almost immediate.

"After about twenty seconds I thought, 'I stuck my finger in the socket,'" he claims.

According to him, part of the audience understood what he was trying to do, part understood and hated the idea, and the majority did not understand and hated both the performance and him personally.

"I continued anyway," he said.

Upon returning to the hotel, he had to speak on the phone with Mayor Dinkins.

"My manager couldn't even open the hotel room door because of the amount of messages that were shoved under it," he recalled.

Today, he believes that his intentions are not what matters most.

"It's the impact you have on other people that matters. If you haven't thought about it carefully, then you have to. I thought I could handle the best, and I couldn't. It was stupid, it wasn't my place to do it, it was wrong, and it hurt people," he concluded.

"So I apologize again to everyone listening, because I was arrogant enough to think I had anything useful to offer on the subject," the actor added.

Back in 1993, Goldberg told The New York Times that the whole situation "caused great pain to a man who did not deserve it."