Ted Danson reveals the surprising celebrity he gets mistaken for even though they 'don't look anything alike'

"Hey, Tony!"

So much for everybody knowing your name.

Cheers star Ted Danson is revealing that he has often been mistaken for another '80s and '90s sitcom leading man — despite them not bearing much of a resemblance to each other.

"There was a period for about five years," Danson said of his surprising celebrity doppelgänger on Friday's episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show. "I'll tell you who it was, it was Tony Danza."

Amanda Edwards/Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Ted Danson and Tony Danza

Amanda Edwards/Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Ted Danson and Tony Danza

Related: A Man on the Inside star Ted Danson just wants to 'try to be funny at every age'

While Danson noted that he and the Who's the Boss? star "don't look anything alike," he theorized that their somewhat similar names might cause confusion among fans. "There's the Ted Danson, Tony Danza, must have happened."

Danson famously played baseball-player-turned-bartender Sam Malone on Cheers, which ran from 1982 to 1993. Meanwhile, Danza is known for playing housekeeper Tony Micelli (also a former ballplayer) on Who's the Boss?, which aired from 1984 to 1992.

"The first time [the mixup] happened to me, I was in New York, and a bunch of construction workers, I walked by, and they went, 'Hey, Tony,'" Danson recalled. "And I don't look around. because my name's Ted. And, 'Hey! Tony Danza! What are you, too good for us now?"

Related: A Man on the Inside star Ted Danson just wants to 'try to be funny at every age'

Host Jennifer Hudson asked Danson if he responded.

"No," he answered. "I kept going just to make sure that Tony got a little…" He jokingly pounded a fist into his other hand. Danson also said he once signed an autograph with Danza's name.

Since Cheers, Danson has gone on to star on such shows as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Good Place, Becker, and Mr. Mayor.

His latest project is the Netflix show A Man on the Inside, in which he plays an elderly man hired by a private investigator to go undercover in a nursing home suspected of elder abuse.

Related: Mike Schur says it was 'a no-brainer' to cast Ted Danson as a nursing home spy in A Man on the Inside

Series creator Mike Schur said that it was his producing partner, Morgan Sackett, who first pitched the idea of casting Danson in an adaptation of the 2021 documentary The Mole Agent.

"It was a no-brainer idea that I guess proves that I have no brain," Schur joked to EW in September. "Because, the idea, once it was presented to me, it was like, oh, of course we do this. That is a perfect idea."