Danny DeVito Reveals the One Caveat He Had Before g Onto ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’
Though It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Danny DeVito may have decided to sign onto the FXX sitcom due to a “gut feeling” — “It’s why you do anything,” he once explained — there was one factor that nearly stopped him from ing The Gang entirely: having to be himself.
Prior to emerging ass-naked from a couch and into our hearts as Frank Reynolds, DeVito first learned of It’s Always Sunny after his longtime colleague, TV producer John Landgraf, asked him for his take on a “really crazy show” he had done for FX.
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“I loved it. It was fucking outrageous,” DeVito recalled of screening the initial episodes of the series with his then-wife, Rhea Perlman, and their children on an episode of The Always Sunny Podcast.
Despite offering rave reviews for the dark comedy — “This is like, an amazing show,” he ed telling Landgraf — DeVito’s outspoken praise was met with silence; until, “all of a sudden,” Landgraf reached back out with an offer to the cast. The Taxi alum immediately replied with a “yeah,” but he still had one caveat before agreeing to drop by Paddy’s Pub: He didn’t want to simply play himself.
“If they come up with an organic character, something that was not just Danny DeVito coming into a show, if it made sense,” he said.
The Always Sunny writers, of course, rose to the occasion, creating the magnum-condom-toting, hundred-wad-carrying Trash Man we’ve come to know and love. The rest is, as they say, history. “It was a good character,” DeVito recalled. “And so they wrote me in.”
