Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney discuss the new season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Charlie and Rob were hilarious. Would fans really want to see inside of Danny’s butt? Those are the questions worth finding the answers to. I love these guys! The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia pressroom was a blast to cover. If you haven’t seen Horrible Bosses make sure you check it out. That movie with Charlie never gets old. Watch the season nine premiere of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Wednesday, September 4th at 10pm on FXX.
Danny DeVito whitey tighties or slathered in Purell:
Rob McElhenney: I feel like I’ve seen so much of Danny nude that at this point…
Charlie Day: You have to remember for every thirty second shot of Danny naked, or something on the show, that is a couple of hours for us in the editing room. We are officially scarred for life. If you’ve been rewinding those scenes over and over then you know the feeling but yeah, we’ve seen a lot.
Writing the episodes:
Rob McElhenney: We all sit in the writer’s room on that first day and usually the process is that we all come in and we say hey, what are some ideas that we want to do this season. Having four months off in between gives us a lot of time to think about that. We usually spend the first three days talking about that and then over the course of the next three months we start piecing them together and then breaking them down. From that point, we will assign writers – but generally it will be the two of us writing at the same time. Charlie and I will write, I think this year we wrote three or four episodes, just the two of us. Glenn and Charlie will write an episode and then some of the writers will write an episode. Everything goes through the same process at the end where the three of us will go through line by line and punch up every single episode, make sure that it works.
Charlie Day: Or sometimes we will break it down and start completely over. If we assigned it and weren’t happy. Sometimes we throw it out and start over.
Rob McElhenney: It’s a painstaking process. We never just go oh, I’ll bang it out.
Charlie Day: It never gets through without going through this guy, and mine and Glenn’s intensely strong opinions. [Laughing.] It’s a good process. It makes the show what it is.
Pacific Rim:
Charlie Day: It was nice to play a character who is almost as smart as I am.
Rob McElhenney: And who doesn’t eat cat food.
Working with Mary Elizabeth Ellis:
Charlie Day: My wife has an amazing sense of humor and is a wonderful actress. It’s certainly one of the reasons why I wanted to marry her and we have a good sense of chemistry at home, obviously. Getting a chance to do that on the screen and sort of play the opposite of how we feel about each other, just the characters themselves, the nine-year history of these characters. It’s been fun to keep going to that well and playing all the little and different shades of colors that we can on how these two feel about each other. There is not a lot of that in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so it’s nice to bring a little bit of that to the show. I like it and I would do more with my wife. I think we should do a movie together.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia movie rumors:
Charlie Day: I wouldn’t rule it out but currently we are just working on season nine and then we’ll do season ten. Who knows but I can’t imagine writing a Sunny movie anytime too soon. I never say never, but…
Rob McElhenney: The truth is that we have such a creative license to do whatever we want on FX that it’s hard to justify asking fans to pay for more. One season we did a direct to DVD episode, The Christmas episode, and that was because we had so many different ideas that we wanted to do that they wouldn’t allow us on TV but the truth is at this point that we’ve stretched the limits and the boundaries of what they will allow us to do so much that we kind of fit everything into an episode of Sunny. We feel like asking fans to pay for it in addition to what we’ve already been able to give seems a little cheap.
Charlie Day: We would have to really answer that question amongst ourselves. If we are going to do that…
Rob McElhenney: It would be because there is something that…
Charlie Day: People would actually want to look inside of Danny’s butt, you know, not just the outside. We would have to figure out how to really give you something new.
Harder to come up with ideas:
Charlie Day: I would say that it’s harder but that’s the best thing that ever happened to us that it’s gotten harder. I think season eight is one of our best, if not the best, seasons that we have ever done. I think that was because that we walked in the room and said oh, my god we’ve done everything. It’s a little bit easier in the beginning because you are like oh, we’ve done nothing so we can try all these crazy things but when your back is up against the wall because you’ve done so much you really have to dig deep if you care to think of some creative stuff. Sometimes having challenges and limitations forces you creatively to sink or swim. It’s more work to come up with ideas but then it’s more rewarding, I think, when we have those breakthroughs.
FXX:
Rob McElhenney: Basically just to spread the word that we are moving. The only answer that we can really give is that you should check with your local provider and ask if you are going to get it and if not ask them to please get it, but the truth is at this point there is so many different platforms to watch the show on so we don’t feel like our fans are going to miss out.
Charlie Day: That’s true. People have always just found our show on their own. We’ve been a show that has survived thanks to audience ingenuity and not thanks to magazines and certainly no thanks to any awards programs. We’ve solely survived off generations of college kids telling their friends to find the show and then people discovering it, and I think moving to a new network will be the same sort of thing. People will have to just find us.
Rob McElhenney: The truth is that I love Breaking Bad and I love Game of Thrones and I couldn’t tell you watch channel AMC or HBO is. I just go hey, I want to watch Game of Thrones, boop, boop, boop and I’m on Game of Thrones. I just DVR everything anyway and I feel like most of our fans do, too.
Thanksgiving episode:
Charlie Day: We went real deep in the well and brought back my landlord who hasn’t been on in season one. That’s a really fun episode where the characters are realizing that they’ve made so many beefs around town with the various groups around town that in the spirit of Thanksgiving like the Pilgrims and the Indians, we need to come together with our enemies and bury the hatchet and have a little peace treaty. We seek out some of our enemies and have a hilarious dinner and I’m sure you can imagine that it doesn’t go as well as we think it will go.
Rob McElhenney: The McPoyles, Gail the Snail, and Bill Ponderosa are coming back.
Charlie Day: Also Random Guy played by Zachary Knighton who we mistook for Bruce Mathis when we destroyed his car. Rickety Cricket will of course be there.
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