Danny DeVito Reveals the One Caveat He Had Before Signing 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 joining 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 remembered telling Landgraf — DeVito’s outspoken praise was met with silence; until, “all of a sudden,” Landgraf reached back out with an offer to join 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.”
