The joke that could have cost Danny DeVito his career: “Did I screw everything up?”
Gut can get you everywhere; a bold move can make all the difference, with a little bit of shock having the potential to get you noticed and keep you in people’s minds, but it’s a fine line, which Danny DeVito feared he’d crossed.
DeVito’s entire powerful career exists on that line. If you think of the fast array of roles he’s taken on, it’s clear that the actor isn’t afraid of a challenge and isn’t afraid to get a little weird. For me, the two primary characters I think of when I think of him prove that: Harry Wormwood in Matilda, and Frank Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
To do an entire career that includes family comedies, dramas, superhero movies, animated Disney films and beyond, and then to literally beg to be a part of a TV show as wild as It’s Always Sunny is proof of the man’s boldness. The cast of the off-kilter dark comedy initially even put up a fight to a name as big as DeVito getting involved, but it turned out that the actor was already a fan and desperately wanted to be in it.
“I loved it. It was fucking outrageous, just the way they are, OK,” he said about joining the sitcom. He was simply excited for season two anyway, regardless of whether they let him in, but as he was convincing them, his one rule was that his big-name entry shouldn’t disrupt the flow. “I said, ‘If they come up with an organic character, something that was not just Danny DeVito coming into a show, if it made sense’,” he explained as his one requirement for joining the show, and then the rest was history, which was giving him one of his wildest characters that no one would ever have expected.
But DeVito thrives on a thrill and thrives on doing things differently. That’s the foot he started out on as during the audition for one of his breakthrough projects, Taxi, a risk almost cost him it all.
“You audition all the time. I never looked at the log line [when auditioning for a role] like: ‘Audition for male, six foot four’, you know, ‘250 pounds’, I’d go for the audition,” DeVito said as a sign of his early boldness. Regardless of what the callout was looking for, he’d be there, and that’s how he came to be in the room for Taxi.
The role was for a bullying boss, so DeVito hatched a plan to go in with that exact kind of brattiness and authority. “I walked in, they’re all sitting around, and I said with my script in my hand, ‘One thing I want to know before we start: Who wrote this shit?’ and I threw it on the table,” he recalled, but then there was deafening silence.
In that beat of silence, he thought he had completely and utterly fucked it. He thought that must be it, his career was over, this was doomed, and then, they laughed.
“It was almost like a nanosecond of ‘Did I screw everything up?’” he recalled before the relief came. “They fell on the floor. Louie walked into their lives,” he continued about the origin of his character Louie De Palma, stating, “The rest is history”.
