GLENN HOWERTON on
'IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA'

Contributed by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor for Radio Free Entertainment
July 25, 2009

Since its debut in 2005, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has cultivated a loyal following with its signature brand of subversive, irreverent humor delivered by five of the most amoral characters to be found on television today. Following the exploits of a quintet of narcissistic sociopaths who run a bar in Philly, the brilliant comedy series is now enjoying its fifth season on FX.

We had the opportunity to speak to cast members Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, and Kaitlin Olson at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con, where the Sunny stars returned for a second year of greeting fans. With co-star and fellow series writer/producer Charlie Day noticeably absent from the trek to the annual convention, McElhenney and Howerton nonchalantly perpetuated the rumor that their friend had just died--but it was, you know, no big whoop.

In this interview, Glenn Howerton--who plays the self-centered Dennis, and also serves as a series creator, writer, and producer--talks about Sunny's ever-expanding fanbase, the live version of their famed Nightman episode, and the fact that quotes from the show have becoming a battle cry for the U.S. military in Iraq. And as an additional aside, he also talks about his role in the horror movie The Strangers, in which he essentially plays "the guy who goes into the house looking for the monster."

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MEDIA: How are you doing today?

GLENN: I'm very good. I'm especially good now that I'm having a blueberry scone, which is one of my favorite things to eat in the entire world.

How has Comic-Con been treating you?

Tell you what...I'm kind of bummed that we didn't get to do a panel this year. Last year, we were really freaked out. Because, you know, it's hard to gauge what your fanbase is--and certainly when you're coming down to what's essentially a comic book convention, and a sci-fi kind of convention. When we booked it last year, they put us in a huuuuuge room. And we were like, "This is going to suck, because we're going to show up and there's going to be 500 people in a 5,000 seat room." And so we said, "Make it as small as you can possibly make it." And they were like, "Guys, sorry, we can't make it any smaller...We can only do 4,000. That's all we can do." And we were like, "All right. We're screwed, but let's just see what happens." And it was packed to the rafters. There were people standing in the back. So that was kind of the first time we were like, "Okay, people are really catching onto the show now." So it's really gratifying. I mean, we work so hard on this show. That's the truth of the matter. I'm not giving myself a pat on the back. For what it's worth, whether you like it or you don't, we work really, really hard on this show. And it just about kills us every year. So to find out that the show keeps growing exponentially every single year...It just feels really good, you know? We don't get a lot of opportunities to get out and meet fans and talk to people about the show because we're constantly working on it. [laughs] And the three of us rarely, if ever, have time to work on anything other than It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. So to get an opportunity to come down and meet thousands and thousands of people who really appreciate the work that we're doing is the best feeling in the world. You can't describe it, really.

If you decided to get into the spirit of things by dressing up as a character, which would you pick?

[laughs] I guess it would be fun to dress up as the Electric Dream Machine characters and come down--you know, dress up as the Dayman and the Nightman, and maybe Green Man. I mean, we've worn so many different costumes on the show. I don't know how, [but] at some point, somehow, our characters started wearing a lot of costumes. We didn't even notice it until after the third season. We were like, "What are we doing? We wear a lot of costumes!"

What has been one of your favorites?

I'll tell you...One that nobody ever talks about that I did that was a blast was when I dressed up as the child molester, Wendell, and I had to get in that fat make-up and everything. And the guy who did my make-up...I mean, it's extraordinary. I think some people don't even know it's me. It was in the third season, and I did a scene with myself. That was a blast. It was about three and a half, four hours of make-up. And by the time I got out of the chair, I looked like somebody who weighed a hundred pounds more than I did.

Did people on the set recognize you?

It took people a second. I walked around a lot, and a lot of the crew did not know it was me.

You should have an episode with fat suits for everyone...

We talked about that, yeah. "Flash forward 20 years..."

Wendell's remark about the Disney Channel is strangely memorable...

Yeah. Pretty gross. And I actually didn't know how I was going to play the character until right before we shot it. I was kind of at a lost. I was like, "I don't know what I'm doing." I just couldn't land on something that I liked. And I was in the fat make-up and I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my trailer. And from eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I just started doing this voice in the mirror, and it was like a bad Al Pacino impersonation--inspired by the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I was eating. That's the true story.



The set of the bar often has a lot of empty beer bottles strewn around. How much drinking goes on there?

[laughs] Well, we shoot the show in blocks, so most of the time, we'll shoot seven episodes of material that takes place in the bar over a span of four days. So we don't spend a lot of time in that bar--we spend a lot of time in those four days, but we don't spend a lot of days in that bar, believe it or not. On those days, if I'm being honest, most of us never, ever drink real beer. Occasionally, if we're still shooting and it's 10 o'clock at night and it's the last scene, yeah, I'll have a beer.

The episode in which the gang kidnaps a critic got me thinking that the gang can be pretty dangerous, either through amorality or sheer negligence. If you were kidnapped by them, with whom do you think you'd stand the best of survival?

Probably Dee. Or Charlie. I think the only characters who would truly be capable of murder on the show would be Dennis and Frank. And that's because I think Frank is just...His morals are so in the toilet. I'm fairly certain he has killed people. And Dennis is kind of like a total sociopath, you know?

What are some of the coolest things you've received from fans?

We've definitely gotten a lot of stuff from troops overseas. We seem to be a pretty big hit amongst the armed forces. We also found out that we're a bit of a hit with a lot of bands. Because a lot of bands, they're touring around on tour buses, so they have a lot of time to just sit on the bus, watch movies, watch TV shows, watch DVDs. So we've discovered some cool band fans.

Any plans to see any of those bands in concert?

Yeah...Whenever Kings of Leon comes to LA in August, we're going to go to their show. Apparently, we're their favorite show. And they're one of my favorite bands. So that's really, really cool. You get to meet and actually hang out with somebody [whose work] you respect a lot. I love that band. Probably the coolest story I ever heard, though, was my buddy Paul Dunlap, who was an Army translator and interrogator...He was out in the field, and they were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place--the enemy forces were straight ahead, and behind them, and they were kind of surrounded. So they had to call in the Air Force to drop a bunch of bombs on this one area so they could create a path for themselves. And everybody was anticipating the bombs being dropped, and all of a sudden, the planes flew over and all this stuff started exploding, and Paul heard, up ahead, somebody scream, "Rock, flag, and eagle!!!" It was like three guys that screamed "rock, flag, and eagle." And he was like, "Who said that?" And these guys told him the story that every time something blows up in Iraq, they always scream "rock, flag, and eagle" from the show, which I thought was kind of [awesome].

You guys recently put on a live performance of the Nightman rock opera in Los Angeles. How did that go?

Great. It was kind of extraordinary. Another experience that completely blew my mind. We had a buddy who was playing the Troubadour, and he asked us if we would come up and play a couple songs with him from the Nightman episode, which was his favorite episode. And we were like, "Yeah, sure, that'd be fun." Just as a whim, we'll just show up. Got word at the Troubadour, and then all of a sudden, the Troubadour started announcing it as "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Live" on their website. Tickets went on sale. [snaps fingers] Boom. Gone. Within seconds. So then we realized, "Oh, these are It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans coming to see the show." Originally, it was just supposed to be a little appearance that we were going to make. And then we realized, "Well, this could be a good opportunity for us to really put on a live show." So we did the entire Nightman Cometh episode, start to finish, live, with a few additional songs that got cut from the original episode, and a song that we added for the live show. And it's not official yet, but we may be taking it on the road, too.

Cool...

Yeah. Boston, New York, Philly, Seattle, LA, San Francisco. We'll see. That's just a rumor right now.

In the horror movie The Strangers, you play the guy who goes into the house even as the audience is screaming, "Don't go in there!" How did you feel about filling that role?

How do I feel about being "that guy"? [laughs] I grew up a huge horror movie fan, so just to be involved in a horror movie was really, really fun. You know, I don't have a lot of time, so if I'm going to do something, it's got to be something that I at least think is going to be pretty cool. The two Crank movies that I've done, the guys who wrote and directed those movies are friends of mine, so they just asked me to make a cameo...Then The Strangers, I read that script and I was just like, "Wow, this is really good." I mean, it really creeped me out. And as a horror movie fan, I was like, "This is different. This is truly psychological." More of a terror film than, you know, all this horror porn sh*t that's coming out, that I personally don't like. So it was fun, just to get to fly out to South Carolina and do something a little bit different. It was a blast just getting to play in that realm. Because I didn't start off as a comedian. I didn't start off as a comedic actor. I never saw myself as a comedic actor, I never set out to be a comedic actor. It's just I've somehow ended up on a lot of comedies, and then creating this show with Rob and Charlie, it just kind of happened--it's just the path that I've found myself on. So to do something that's not that at all, it's fun.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you, guys.