“Miami Vice” star Don Johnson is taking on a new role as a cruise ship captain

Don Johnson sees himself as a bag. Even at 74, he's not an old sack, but he's still a sack. He explains his approach to acting, which involves emptying himself of the container that is his body and stuffing the character into it. There are separations, but always at least some overlap.

Perhaps that's why it was difficult to distinguish Johnson from his in the late 1980s MiamiVice Alter ego, Sonny Crockett, a gruff, perpetually stubbly cop who lived on a sailboat with a pet alligator, wore Italian suits over pastel T-shirts, drove a Ferrari, and rode in a Kevlar-reinforced 38-foot Wellcraft Scarab.

Johnson shared the character's flowing curls, his sockless, casual-cool charisma and his adventurous lifestyle that included motorboat racing off the coast, counting sunsets with Jimmy Buffet and falling in and out of love with a string of models and actresses.

They were men's men in a time when that meant a swaggering, life-by-the-throat bravado that few questioned.

Except maybe Johnson. “I saw Sonny Crockett as the bane of the American man,” he says in a video call from his home office, dressed in a white “LA” baseball cap and gray hoodie. “The law-and-order part of Sonny's job was overwhelming, impossible to keep up with, and it's kind of draining when you can't make anything happen. By the end of the fifth year, the character was so dark that it touched my soul.”

This is relevant as Johnson is back at the helm in a life and career defined by water and boats, playing the role of Robert Massey, the captain of a luxury cruise ship Doctor Odyssey. The show features a number of guest stars who come on board for episodic stories. This may sound familiar, but it definitely isn't The Love Boat. “It’s more like this The White Lotus on a ship,” Johnson says. “It’s about what happens when people lose control. (Writer/Producer) Ryan Murphy is a genius at figuring out what people want to see.”

Johnson's career trajectory from the epitome of '80s iconoclastic cool to an authority figure in a privileged world – from speedboat to luxury liner – could serve as a metaphor for the evolution of a particular segment of American culture over the last 40 years. “That’s right,” Johnson says with a laugh, then focuses on the possibility of a modern-day Sonny Crockett.

“I think the interesting question in all of this is: Is there a place for this guy in this world?”

It's a question he might never have asked himself if he hadn't become a world-famous actor and '80s sex symbol, albeit through an unlikely path.

On the third day of his senior year of high school, Johnson showed up to business class and vowed to keep his eyes open. He dozed off for the first two days, and his teacher – “she had a voice like Thorazine” – threatened to throw him out.

Johnson needed the course to graduate, but “my butt barely touched the seat and I was sawing logs,” he says, his familiar smile wrapped in a whitening goatee. He was kicked out and the only other course available was a speech and acting section. “And I couldn’t just sign up,” he says. “I had to audition.”

That didn't quite fit. As a child, Johnson shuttled back and forth between Kansas and Missouri, which led to a “strong hillbilly accent,” a passion for sports and spending time in the outdoors, “hunting and fishing with my dad, my uncles and my grandfather,” he says .

Acting was not popular in these social circles. However, since he lacked options, he appeared for the audition and the teacher, Dr. Sharon Pyle not only let him into the class, she also immediately cast him as Tony in “West Side Story.” Suddenly he was not only acting, but also singing and dancing.

“She saw something in me that I didn’t even see myself,” he says. “She started throwing all these wild things at me – Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Sartre, Tennessee Williams and others. Not the rest of the class, just me and this one girl.” She also gave him daily diction worksheets, which relaxed his accent.

Johnson began to reimagine his future. He found his way into the University of Kansas' Summer Reparatory program, which earned him a scholarship to attend the school's acting program. Two years later he set off for California.

A decade and a half of small theater productions and supporting roles in films and television shows followed until he landed in 1984 MiamiVice. The show grew so large so quickly that Johnson soon needed around-the-clock security. “When we were on site, it was not uncommon for us to get out of our trailers and find police cordons holding back a crowd of 10,000 people,” he says. “I couldn’t really go out or do anything.”

He escaped by water.

“I did all the boat work on the show from the beginning,” he says. “I even did the stunts, but not the falls because only the bad guys fell.” He smiles. “I just had a feeling for it. Every time I get into a boat on the water it's like this: Oh, I got that.”

The show retained several versions of its signature Scarab and “the producers made the terrible mistake of giving me one of those boats so I could use it on my own,” he says. “That’s why I spent a lot of my time away from the screen.”

The 330-horsepower MerCruiser sterndrives propelled the vehicle to 70 miles per hour, a taste of speed that left Johnson looking for more. In 1986, he drove a brand new 43-foot Scarab in a 1,100-mile race up the Mississippi, which he won. He later worked with Wellcraft to design a “Don Johnson Signature Edition” of this boat.

In 1988 he turned his attention to offshore racing, taking the helm of a 46-foot Scarab with three turbocharged engines and surface-penetrating drives. After a season of ups and downs, Johnson's boat finished strong, winning the APBA World Championship in the Superboat category and he was named top rider.

Johnson's presence brought unprecedented attention to the sport, reinforced by fellow prominent racers Chuck Norris, Kurt Russell, Walter Payton and Stefano Casiraghi (late husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco), followed by a slew of television cameras.

At the end of the season, he partnered with Revenge Boats and designed and oversaw the production of a 50-foot catamaran called Team USA. “It had four big Chevy truck engines converted into racing engines, each producing 1,100 foot-pounds of torque, which is crazy.”

The boat had four 20-inch exhausts above the waterline and was so loud that, he says, “the first time it was turned over, every window in the shops along the water in Key West shattered.” The first speed test was 150 miles per hour . “We achieved a score of 149 points on the open sea,” he says. “It’s basically a plane at this point. You just land every now and then and hang on for dear life.”

As Johnson flew between shooting and racing locations, Team USA performed well but failed to assert itself as champion, even as he burnished his reputation as fearless and aggressive. “I was fearless because I was good,” Johnson says. “Boat racing required chance and amnesia because you had to block everything out, concentrate on the task at hand and hope nothing went wrong.”

Nothing happened, but as the '80s ended, so did the world in which Sonny Crockett and, to some extent, Don Johnson played a central role. MiamiVice was canceled in 1991. Johnson also stopped racing that year.

However, Johnson's relationship with water endured. “I became good friends with Jimmy Buffett,” he says. “And one of the reasons was that I liked the water and Jimmy liked the water. We loved fishing on it, we loved swimming on it, and we even loved just sitting on it.”

Late 1990s Nash Bridgesanother series of successes came about, as did his fifth marriage, which has existed for 25 years. He has a total of five children, three sons and two daughters, whose ages range from college freshmen to their early 40s.

He educates his boys and at the same time returns to the question of what a modern-day Crockett would look like today. “There’s a place for this guy – but modified“, he says. “My sons hunt and fish and ride motorcycles, they have the adventure bug, but they are not as wild and crazy as me. They do it in a disciplined manner and have fun. The big difference is the opportunity for growth and maturity that women offer us. I have great respect for women. They taught me to be less toxic and more mindful.”

After telling the story of the broken windows in Key West, Johnson leaned toward the screen. “Of course, these things tend to become embellished over time,” he said. “I guess it was just a window cracked.” He laughs, a laugh that suggests it might well not have been one. The anecdote contains echoes of a very different time and place, but it's better this way – it's entertaining, but more honest, more real. Changed.

““Doctor Odyssey” premieres September 26 at 9 p.m. on ABC and is streaming on Hulu.