Danny DeVito, Never Retire (Bitch)

About halfway through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Season 6 Christmas special, a man at an office party asks, “Is there a man in that couch?”

There is, in fact, a man in that couch. It’s Frank Reynolds, the character played by legendary actor Danny DeVito, who, throughout 13 seasons, has gone from problematic father to disgusting degenerate. Frank’s in that couch because Dennis and Dee, his once-presumed-to-be biological children (it’s a long story that involves a blood bucket), are staging a bastardized version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in an effort to show him what people really think of him (and to convince him to give them better presents). That couch, located in the middle of his former company’s Christmas party, is a hiding spot—one Frank was oddly happy to suggest (“I do it all the time at home,” he says in an of course I do kind of way). But in choosing it he forgot a couple of things: That it’s fairly easy to tell when a man has been sewn into a couch, and that it’s rather difficult to breathe from the inside of one.

Which is why, shortly after his leather-bound cover is blown, Frank—who is completely naked and absolutely drenched in sweat—pierces through the couch’s lining and squiggles to freedom. It’s quite grotesque, like a love seat giving birth to a hairy, 5-foot-tall, 70-year-old man. It’s also one of the funniest things you’ll ever see.

“I think a lot about how someone shot ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’” says Fred Savage, The Wonder Years actor turned director who was in the chair for “A Very Sunny Christmas.” “And then Michael Curtiz, the director [of Casablanca], went home, kissed his wife, and tucked his kids into bed … but did he know driving home that he’d shot this indelible moment in cinema? Do you know that you’ve done something magnificent? Because there’ve been a handful of times in my career when I’ve driven home and thought, ‘That was something special; that was something miraculous.’ And, hands down, one of those moments was when a greased-up, naked Danny burst out of that leather couch.”

Ask Danny DeVito about the time he slithered out of a couch nude and he perks up: “That was a cool idea—I liked that idea right away,” he says, staring upward with a twinkle in his eye. “It was hot in there before I broke through, but they had me greased up. … I was like a halibut, man.”

But DeVito’s fondest memory of filming the scene was shocking Kaitlin Olson, who plays Dee, into speechlessness. “There’s a great take on YouTube where Kaitlin doesn’t say her line,” DeVito says. He begins to sputter trying to get the story out. “She’s so stunned when I come out for the first time. She’s like … and I’m saying, ‘Hot, hot, hot, hot,’ and she’s looking at me like, ‘What the fuck?’”

“It was made very clear that the goal was to get this in one shot and immediately get Danny into a robe and cleaned up,” Olson explains over email. “We are finally rolling, he fires out of that couch and somersaults to the ground in a way that allowed me to see every single part of his body. Parts I wasn’t anticipating. He’s writhing around on the floor and I’m thinking about how I will never speak of this to him. Then I’m wondering why he’s still writhing and why no one is saying anything. That’s when he calmly looked up at me from the floor and said, ‘It’s your line.’”

A pure entertainer at heart, perhaps nothing in the world makes DeVito happier than garnering a genuine reaction. He’s spent his entire life hunting down moments like this, when he can floor someone by talking a certain way or moving a certain way. Olson also offers a different, though equally profound, takeaway on the experience: “The moral of the story is that Danny DeVito has a mesmerizing b-hole.”

FX

It’s difficult to recall a time when Danny DeVito wasn’t part of our lives because the truth is that, for many of us, he always has been. The now-74-year-old actor (he’ll be 75 in November) is about to enter his fifth decade as an actor, a career dotted with iconic roles in Oscar-winning movies (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Terms of Endearment), long-running TV shows (Taxi), classic superhero films (Batman Returns), and unforgettable children’s movies (Matilda). Brad Pitt likes to say that acting is a young man’s game, but DeVito’s later-in-life run on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—premiering its 14th season on Wednesday night—has reinvigorated his career and introduced him to a whole new generation that primarily expresses its affection through memes. DeVito has an overly active reddit page dedicated to him; in 2018, a girl brought a cardboard cutout of him to her high school prom—which he reciprocated by bringing a cardboard cutout of the student to the Always Sunny set. Danny DeVito belongs to everyone, a rare distinction for a person in Hollywood. Even though there may be more decorated actors from his generation, he’s the only one for whom a group of college students built a shrine hidden behind a bathroom wall. “I don’t know shit,” DeVito says when asked about his outsized influence on teenagers. “We’re all figuring it out, you know what I mean?”

“No one’s done it better for longer than Danny,” Savage says. “He’s an incredibly talented guy who, in any field—producer, director, actor—has had a career you can be proud of, and he’s put them all together in one career.”

After getting his start in theater, it didn’t take long for DeVito to carve out a career for himself. In 1975, DeVito reprised the character he played on Broadway, the blackjack-obsessed Martini in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; three years later he kicked off a 114-episode run on Taxi as Louie de Palma, an iconic New York City wiseass who perfectly fit DeVito’s Asbury Park accent and ability to wear an unbuttoned suit vest and make being mean seem somehow sweet. By the late 1980s he’d grown his hair into a ponytail for movies like Throw Momma From the Train (a deeply weird dark comedy about matricide that he directed) and Twins (a deeply weird light comedy about DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger having the same DNA).

The ’90s is when DeVito really kicked into overdrive, although perhaps it just feels that way as a person who grew up in the ’90s, which is part of the point: There are different Danny DeVitos for everyone. In 1991, DeVito founded his production company, Jersey Films, with Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher. The first film they produced was Hoffa, which DeVito costarred in alongside Jack Nicholson, and from there the company helped kickstart the careers of some of Hollywood’s foremost creators—from Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) to Ben Stiller (Reality Bites) to Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich) to Method Man and Redman (How High). “It was a remarkable place,” FX CEO John Landgraf, who was Jersey Films’ head of TV until 2003, says. “Michael and Stacey were really vital to that place, but it was really infused with Danny’s spirit.”

Soon the ponytail era was over, replaced by a stringy wig the color of burnt seaweed for his role as Penguin in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. To that point, no role had better captured the magic of DeVito, a willingness to go bigger and stranger that borders on irrational eagerness. “Penguin was a gift because it was very operatic and I like to go big,” DeVito says, propping his leg on a nearby couch to go fully into storyteller mode. “That was like, hmm, that was fun. Oswald and the cave … aw, man, the shit—two and a half hours of makeup was amazing.”

Here is a man fondly reminiscing about extensive makeup work! “It was great. Extensions and drool and … there was a thing, I think it was Brando or Nicholson or one of them, said was, ‘It’s always good to work with jewelry.’” I couldn’t find this quote anywhere, but because DeVito is DeVito, it’s entirely possible that Marlon Brando or Jack Nicholson (or one of them) said it directly to him. “Your fake teeth, eyeballs, a hairpiece, a this, a that—that’s all jewelry. It’s like a cane, you got a hunchback, you put a wedge in your shoe so you limp—anything so that, like, you don’t have to be an actor, you can hide. … That was fun, I loved it.”

Warner Bros.

As DeVito walks—or maybe “moseys” is the word that more aptly encapsulates his attitude—into the room adjacent to the studio where he’s recording his part in the 2020 film The One and Only Ivan, he sets down four individually wrapped toothpicks on a nearby desk. “You wanna sit in that chair?” he asks, more requesting than suggesting. “Then we can look at each other.” After a few seconds he moves toward the window in this fourth-story office to try to crack it open. When it actually does open—not many in New York City office buildings do—he exclaims, “That’s very rare!” with a laugh. “Because they think you’re gonna toss yourself out.”

He kicks off his black clogs and unwraps one of his toothpicks. As we talk, he digs into his teeth with a casualness I can’t help but admire.

After the stretch that included Batman Returns, Hoffa, and Get Shorty, DeVito made a momentous turn toward children’s movies, starring as the father and narrator in 1996’s Matilda and lending his iconic voice to movies like Space Jam and Hercules. It wasn’t the first time he’d dipped his toe into youth programming—he of course provided the voice of the unfortunately named Grundle King in the 1986 My Little Pony movie (because his daughter loved the toy)—but doing those projects, all of which became major touchstones, in such quick succession cemented his place in the hearts of millennials. “It’s fun to do stuff for kids,” DeVito tells me, inadvertently touching on the same instinct—a desire for undivided attention—that led him to climb out of a couch naked. “If it comes out right, if it’s good, if it works right, and you see the movie with the kids, you can’t beat it. … They trust it. They believe it. They’re with it. They’re invested in it. The connection is just unbeatable.”

“That scumbag?” Sam Rockwell, who’s starring alongside DeVito in his latest kids’ movie, The One and Only Ivan, says through a laugh. “I love him so much. … He’s just an amazingly menschy guy. He’s a good guy and a great actor—and a very smart guy—but he’s got a wisdom about him. He keeps a cool head and a warm heart, and that’s a rare thing.”

Beyond the unexpected impression he made on ’90s kids, in the later years of the decade and the early 2000s, it seemed as though DeVito was somewhat winding down, transitioning in his 50s into a mode of sporadic character acting: a John Grisham movie here, a couple of more Tim Burton movies (Mars Attacks! and Big Fish) there; another dark comedy here (Death to Smoochy), an Emmy-nominated guest appearance as a male stripper on Friends there. But a full stop on working was never DeVito’s plan, and in 2006—partially on the advice of the same daughter who put him in My Little Pony: The Movie—he joined the cast of a fledgling sitcom on a fledgling cable network about a group of horrible friends who run a crappy bar in South Philadelphia.

“At the time I was like—I can’t remember what I was doing,” DeVito says. “I was hanging out and that thing. I’d seen the show, the first eight. … I thought I dug it. I dug what they were doing.”

It’s difficult to overstate how low of a profile FX had when it aired the first season of Always Sunny in 2005. The network had only just begun to make inroads as a prestige cable network with shows like Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me. As for Sunny, which FX green-lit off the strength of a pilot that creator Rob McElhenney had filmed with his friends and collaborators Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton for $200, it hadn’t even come close to getting the attention those pulpy dramas had. Despite a strong first season that very clearly messaged the show’s desire to be an unapologetic neo-Seinfeld—early episodes include plots in which the gang embraces underage drinking because it helps business and in which Charlie fakes having cancer—it was watched by an average of only 1.1 million viewers. Landgraf had faith in the show and was willing to renew it for a second, but with a caveat: McElhenney, Day, and Howerton had to add a more prominent name to the cast.

“I had just always thought that Rob McElhenney and Charlie and Glenn and Kaitlin were unbelievably special—they were great writers and showrunners even though they didn’t have any bona fides or any experience,” says Landgraf. “And I knew that the show just needed another element to rise above the clutter of television, so I talked to the guys about creating a part for Danny.”

“We didn’t wanna do it,” McElhenney told The Nerdist in 2015. “We were really reticent to add anything to the chemistry, but they started knocking around names and Danny’s came and we went, ‘Well, I guess that kind of makes sense.’”

“In terms of the kind of names that were being thrown around, Danny was perfect,” Howerton said in the same interview. “Not that he’s played only despicable characters, but he’s played a shitload of despicable characters, and our characters are kind of despicable, but we like to think they’re lovable in their own way—and Danny’s one of those guys.”

The fit was as natural as it seems now, after 14 years. “Danny fired into our lives, and we clicked right away,” Olson says. McElhenney, Day, and Howerton, three little-known actors in their 20s, were understandably hesitant to welcome a 61-year-old legend into a show that was entirely of their making. Maybe he’d overshadow them, or turn an ensemble show into a star-driven vehicle, or, worst of all, not understand their humor. What they found instead was a kindred spirit, a performer both willing to be directed and go as deep into a gutter as possible.

“I thought, first of all, ‘It’s a really good character,’” DeVito tells me, “‘and I’m going to have so much fucking fun it ain’t funny.’ And that has proven to be absolutely, nail-to-the-wall true.” What is DeVito’s idea of fun? How about being stuck in a playground coil in his underwear, or dousing himself in Purell and crawling around a bar floor in a flu-ridden angst, or gurgling beer on the side of a suburban neighborhood street.

“They’re just creative soul mates,” says Landgraf. “That guy is just brave and up for anything; he’s just a kamikaze artist and comedian. He’ll not only do anything if he thinks it’s good and funny—he’ll push you harder. So it was just kind of that way from the beginning.”

The funny thing is, Frank Reynolds wasn’t always such a demented human being. When DeVito joined the show for Season 2, Frank was more traditionally disgraceful, an absentee father who made an unspeakable amount of money running sweatshops in Vietnam. But by the end of that season, it had been revealed that Frank wasn’t Dennis and Dee’s biological father—if anything, he was Charlie’s—which loosened his ties to the gang and freed up the direction in which the character could go. That direction was decidedly downward. By Season 4 he was pooping the bed (that he shared with Charlie), and by Season 5 he was in need of an intervention—not that it worked: Two seasons later he was proposing to a crack-addicted hooker. As Frank grew more and more disgusting, so did Sunny, eventually achieving a sort of sublime foulness like nothing else on television. Much of Frank’s devolution was a product of DeVito being up to do anything—often of his own accord. “There’s nothing I know of that Danny’s been presented with that he hasn’t been excited to do,” says Olson. “The weirder, the better.”

“Whatever the guys threw at him, he just ran headlong into,” Savage adds.

“I love to do shit like that,” DeVito tells me with glee. “I’ve been telling them for 15 years: ‘You gotta push the envelope, you gotta push the envelope. You gotta make it crazy, you gotta be that far out.’”

Always Sunny has now been on the air for 144 episodes, with at least 10 more on the way—after coming deathly close to being canceled after its first season, it’s now the longest-running live-action comedy in TV history. Part of that can be attributed to Landgraf’s unique support of the show, but to a greater degree the show’s endurance is due to a mix of fearlessness, willingness to evolve with the times, and a sense of devotion among the core cast.

“Everybody’s still nuts,” DeVito says with affection. “They’ve all got other things going. But, you know, drop of the hat, we’ll all go to wherever it is—some shithole in the Valley—and make the show.”

He pulls the toothpick from his mouth; it’s fulfilled its purpose.

Universal Pictures

“You have a gun?”

Being asked this question by Danny DeVito is jarringly surreal. One moment you’re 12 and listening to DeVito wax on about Matilda’s life and then years go by and suddenly that same voice is bombarding you about lethal weapons.

He does have a reason for asking, to be fair. We landed on this topic because I wondered whether he’d ever refused to do anything on Always Sunny, to which he answered that the only thing he’s ever said no to is a bobblehead of his character holding a gun (Frank is very much in favor of the Second Amendment). “I said, ‘Fuck no, man, this is the one thing I don’t want.’ … And they said, ‘What do you want to put in there?’ And I said, ‘How about the condoms?’” (Frank is also very much in favor of Magnum condoms.) “At least, I felt like, if a kid buys a doll he’s reminded that he’s got to be protected when he has sex rather than he’s got to take a gun and shoot somebody.”

With relative ease, DeVito launches into some galling statistics about gun violence in America and the pain such realities cause him. “I’m very anti-gun,” he says. “I hate the fact that we have guns on the street. Do you know how many rounds of ammunition are sold in the United States every year? Ten billion. … That’s fucked up, man.” In a matter of minutes he’s touched on gun control, climate change, immigration, Howard Zinn, conversion therapy, the burning forests in the Amazon, and Flint, Michigan. “You know, the thing about me, I was not totally aware of what was going on in the world,” DeVito says. “I wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to direct. … Then I started reading and looking at things … and all the history starts stewing around and you start having feelings about what really took place.” He crosses his arms, stretching each hand to the opposite end of his body until he’s practically hugging himself.

For anyone who follows DeVito on Twitter, the activist streak shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, he’s responsible for one of the most iconic tweets in the site’s history. On March 2, 2013, he tweeted four simple but profoundly effective words:

DeVito can’t remember exactly why he tweeted this—Intelligencer’s Brian Feldman speculated in 2017 that it may have been in response to Antonin Scalia’s oral arguments for a ruling that effectively crippled the Voting Rights Act of 1965—but he remembers how he felt when he tweeted it. “My feelings were hurt,” he says. “In my opinion, he was standing in the way of something.”

At this point he leans in closer, as I realize that the bottom button of his shirt is unbuttoned and briefly wonder whether it’s been like that the whole time. “The Supreme Court is bullshit,” he says, emphasizing the last word with a little spittle and a Godfather-esque hand gesture. “I’m sorry. You have Clarence up there sitting. Doesn’t even move. I don’t know what he does. And I love the fact that Ruth is kicking ass and trying her best to stay alive. God bless her and I hope she lives to be 200 years old. But it’s ludicrous. You look back at the Bush-Gore election, you go, ‘What the fuck was that?’ And chads and the this and the that. Come on, is this bullshit or what? Are we living a life of bullshit? Yeah.”

The thing about Danny DeVito is sometimes you just have to let him go. He’s frequently cordial and sweet, but there’s also still fire in his belly, and he’s at the point in his life when he doesn’t care enough to try to put it out. The fun part is that when he gets going like this he’s still as magnetic as he is on screen. The diatribe on Scalia over, he picks up the thread on Twitter. “I remember when the Sunny guys and Kaitlin were saying, ‘Oh, Twitter is out.’ I don’t know when it was, I can’t give you a year—like I said, I don’t remember shit. And they said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do this.’ What am I gonna do? And so I said … my first tweet was, ‘My balls are on fire.’” Basically:

“Then I said, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I can’t keep doing this, right?’ What am I gonna do? Every day, put up something? But you, you know, want to be a part of it. … So then I started Troll Foot.”

Troll Foot is, in simple terms, a now decade-long series of, well, DeVito’s foot. He’s posted his Troll Foot in Germany, in Central Park, and from a dentist’s office. He’s brought it to Comic-Con and to see the Lakers play. For a while—around 2010, what we could call the Peak of Troll Foot—DeVito was posting photos almost once a day. That frequency has slowed down in recent years. “I haven’t been inspired that much in the past year to tweet Troll Foot,” he says, like it’s a normal thing to say.

Still, it’s an apt summary of DeVito’s personality. He’s a performer through and through, constantly trying to get a rise or a laugh out of you, and as part of that, he’s also genuinely interested in staying up to date on culture and technology (“I text like a teenager,” he tells me later, adding that his favorite emoji is the big smiling one), understanding that the younger generations set the agenda, and that to reject that would be to accept obsolescence. But he’s also deeply weird, a man with a slightly sick, frequently gross sense of humor. Not that we didn’t know that—watch Throw Momma From the Train or any episode of Always Sunny and you’ll pick up on the hilariously twisted person DeVito is; it’s just a little more front-facing now that he has a platform from which to tell Scalia to retire (bitch) and disperse pictures of his foot.

FX

At nearly 75 years old, DeVito has zero plans to retire. “There is no fucking way in hell I’m going to stop working,” he says flatly. It’s a bit of a concerning resolution, but at the same time, it’s also somewhat inspiring—that this person has found the thing that makes him feel life is worth living and has decided to do it until he no longer is.

“How old is he now?” Rockwell asks me, replying in full-on disbelief when I tell him: “Fuck him. He’s an animal. I’m hoping to be on a beach by 75.”

Not DeVito, though: “What am I gonna do?” he asks. “Go sit on a beach somewhere?” He makes a bit of a dismissive grunt when I respond that many people would love to sit on a beach for the rest of their days. “He’s not a beach guy,” Rockwell resolves.

“I put Danny in that category of people whose need to create and learn and contribute is at the core of their being,” Landgraf says. This is just who DeVito is—forever moving forward, forever a performer, forever capable of leaving an impression.

“When I was a kid in New Jersey,” DeVito continues, “I didn’t want to go around people. I was always different. I was a little smaller than everybody. I was always a creature-like character. I was a little shy. Then you go on stage and you’re a character. When I went to school, first time I got on stage, I just fucking loved it, man. I thought it was like—holy crap.” He’s not specifically talking about the couch moment in Always Sunny, but he’s not not talking about it. And when he puts things this way, it’s incredibly clear why he stripped down and greased up in the first place. “It was terrifying but it was, like, once you got there—it was so glorious.”