The ‘Seinfeld’ role Danny DeVito turned down: “His career would’ve been at its apex”
If you haven’t watched the latest season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, then not only are you missing out on what has been the funniest comedy on TV for almost 20 years, but you’re also missing out on seeing Danny DeVito doing some of the best work of his career.
He continues to be utterly unhinged as Frank Reynolds in the series, the completely selfish, unhygienic, money-obsessed, immoral dad to Dee and Dennis, who lives in a hovel with Charlie and outdoes the gang’s manic schemes at every turn.
If there’s one episode in the newest season, the 17th, that you really need to check out, then make it the second episode, titled ‘Frank Is in a Coma’ which is a masterpiece of comic writing with a Nolan-esque twist at the end and marks one of DeVito’s finest moments on the long-running show, despite the fact he is barely in it.
But things could have been very strange had casting for another American sitcom gone differently back in the late 1980s, because we would have had Danny DeVito as George Costanza in Seinfeld instead. According to the man who did wind up playing Costanza on Jerry Seinfeld’s country-conquering show that ran for nine seasons until 1998, Jason Alexander, several household names were up for the role, including Nathan Lane, Steve Buscemi, Chris Rock and DeVito, but “For whatever reason they didn’t take it”.
It even went as far as DeVito being offered the part, which he declined, and Alexander told Howard Stern in an appearance on his radio show, “I think in the case of Danny, he probably didn’t want to be; his career, when we started Seinfeld, would’ve been at its apex, so he probably didn’t want to do a sidekick role.”
Sometimes things work out exactly how they’re supposed to, though, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone else other than Alexander as Seinfeld’s long-suffering buddy, just as you can’t fathom how any other actor could play Frank Reynolds as perfectly as DeVito has since 2006.
Of course, DeVito is far more than that part; he is a multi-talented filmmaker who has not only starred in classics as far back as 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but also directed movies including the vastly underrated and little-seen (at least outside the UK) Death to Smoochy starring Ed Norton.
Although he has slowed down the acting as he moves into his 80s, he has still directed an upcoming film called St Sebastian starring the late Lance Reddick and served as a producer on two other projects, a TV series adapted from the sci-fi movie Gattaca and a thriller starring his daughter Lucy, called Drag.
Just this week, he compared notes with Colin Farrell as they spoke about their different versions of Batman’s nemesis, The Penguin, and he also revealed how much he loves playing Frank on It’s Always Sunny, describing the show and its creators as “amazing”.
As for Jason Alexander post-Seinfeld, he perhaps struggled with escaping the shadow of his famous character, although that could be said for most of the cast to some degree, with the exception of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He did, however, win a Tony award for his work in a musical back in 1989 and a Daytime Emmy for ‘Best Original Song’ in 2020 for ‘Brainwashed by Toons’ and has worked consistently on stage and screen ever since.
