FUNNY GUY. RIPPED DUDE. MODERN MAN.
Yes, the star of Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. (Oh, and Deadpool and a million other things, including the upcoming Free Guy.) They’re friends and business partners – except they’ve never actually been in the same room.
The world first noticed Rob McElhenney 16 years ago as an above-average-looking guy on a quirky cable comedy, but no one really saw him until what became known as ‘The Dance’ episode. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia had been on for 13 seasons at that point – this was 2018 – and viewers had come to expect the odd and unexpected from “the gang”. But nobody expected the sight of a shirtless McElhenney leading a partner in a four-and-a-half-minute rain-soaked, extremely dramatic pas de deux – a scene best described, to quote one viewer at length, “as pure art … one of the most beautiful [four and a half] minutes I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t think I can recall a dance sequence that ever left me in tears. What’s interesting about perception is how we really don’t know each other. When I say ‘each other,’ I mean everyone on this great green spinning shit-wheel. Everyone has a secret or a talent or something that is inside of them that needs to come out. That was the first time I really looked at [McElhenney] in a way that was much different”.
The viewer wasn’ t the only one. McElhenney wasn’t just another above-average-looking guy who’d recently transformed his body – losing 30 kg and getting shredded into eight-pack shape – but a man of hidden depths and boundless ambition. As Sunny costar Danny DeVito whispers toward the end of ‘The Dance’, “Oh my God … I get it”.
McElhenney, now 44 and a father of two, has been busy working through those depths and ambitions ever since. which he cocreated and stars on with wife Kaitlin Olson, will enter its 15th season (thus officially beating for the longest-running live-action TV comedy in history) when it returns (hopefully) later this, the Apple TV+ sitcom that answers the question “What would happen if you crossed with ?” Somehow he managed to find time to buy Wrexham AFC, a fifth-tier soccer team in Wales, with Ryan Reynolds (that’s right, the actor and Aviation Gin co-owner), who also happens to be the teary-eyed stan quoted earlier. The two guys became pandemic friends, and since they both know a little about physical transformations and life as a modern man, we thought it might be fun if Reynolds, also 44, interviewed McElhenney via Zoom, with riding shotgun. Reynolds kindly agreed, though he had to start with a confession.
