Glenn Howerton Has a “Mind Meld” With the It’s Always Sunny Gang
Spoilers follow for the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia season-17 premiere, “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” which premiered on FXX on July 9.
On It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “What is Dennis Reynolds doing?” is usually a question with a creepy answer.
The bar owner, played for 20 years by the elastic-faced Glenn Howerton, has a history of secretly taping his sexual encounters with women, fantasizing about making furniture with his twin sister’s skin, and generally being a menace who can go from placid to enraged real quick. When “Volunteers,” the first of It’s Always Sunny’s pair of crossover episodes with ABC’s Abbott Elementary, aired in January, Dennis was mostly off-screen, hiding from Abbott’s documentary-film crew. (Narratively, because of his previous experience with being filmed, in season 12’s “Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer”; logistically, because Howerton’s on-set availability was limited thanks to his supporting turn on Sirens.) Now, six months later, the mystery of what Dennis was doing for the gang’s week of in-school volunteering is clarified in It’s Always Sunny’s season-17 premiere. “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” fills us in, and it’s surprisingly tame: Dennis was using lab equipment to brew the teachers’ coffee. How nice! And in line with how Howerton incorporates certain elements of his own life into Dennis — not the possible serial killing, but his irritation with Teslas in season 16’s “Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day” and, now, Howerton’s own high standards for his java.
“The reason I pitched that was because I’m that way about coffee. I don’t have a setup like Gale has in Breaking Bad, but I’m very, very, very picky,” says Howerton, who edits the series’ blooper reel every year and confirms it should include some outtakes from this Abbott crossover episode. “I just thought it would be funny if Dennis sees this one little problem and then takes it upon himself to solve this problem that nobody even really recognizes. I find that to be the case with a lot of things that I tend to get hung up on.”
In “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” Dennis is brewing coffee; he’s getting the kids to sing the gang’s favorite, Boyz II Men, for a potential boy band; he’s rewriting “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with Charlie. This episode was written by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Keyonna Taylor. Did they ask you for any suggestions about what Dennis would be doing?
A lot of those ideas were mine. I was in the writers’ room when we were breaking that episode. I don’t remember if it was me or somebody else that came up with the idea of us doing a new version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but I was like, “Wait, no, Fall Out Boy already did a version of that.” And in the room, everyone was like, “Dammit, now that means we can’t do it.” And I was like, “No, that’s even funnier, if we have this weird grudge against Fall Out Boy because they’re always beating us to the punch on everything, and they even beat us to the punch on this.” It’s so random, and it struck me as very, very funny, the idea of us being so angry at Fall Out Boy.
Both episodes are filmed in the Abbott Elementary mockumentary style, and in the It’s Always Sunny premiere, Dennis often accidentally makes eye contact with the camera and then tries to present a more proper version of himself. Was all of that blocked out, or were you given freedom to choose which cameras you’d be looking at and reacting to?
The great thing about that mockumentary style is you don’t really have marks. You have a general direction that you’re gonna go in, but everything’s totally handheld, so you can improvise a lot, and there was a lot of messing around with where we had the cameras. My character’s whole thing is to be very self-conscious of being filmed, and everybody else is frustrating me because they’re forgetting that there are cameras pointed at us. I’m the only one remembering, and so I’m constantly commenting on it. Giving a look into the camera and having my character be a little bit more aware, and then me also forgetting at times — that was a lot of fun to mess around with. There are blind spots for Dennis, too, where he doesn’t realize what he’s doing is ridiculous. My character knew that there were cameras on us when we were auditioning the kid to be in our boy band; I just didn’t think that was a bad thing that we were doing. Or making the coffee — that’s not a bad or weird thing to do, in Dennis’s mind, so there was no reason to try to hide from the cameras in those moments.
There is a moment in the boy-band scene where Frank starts talking about how they need a “hot” member, and Dennis is first shocked, then resets his face, so you look more neutral when actively looking at the camera. It plays like in that split second, you remember the cameras are there.
I appreciate you noticing those things. Sometimes, I worry that the more subtle things like that don’t always come through.
Your portrayal of Dennis is always very physical. When Dennis learns that Fall Out Boy already remade “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” the muscles in your neck become pronounced, your jaw twitches. You’ve said of playing Dennis, “When my character’s angry, I’m not playing anger. I’m fucking angry. Furious. Because to me that’s funnier.” In the context of that quote, how much anger were you bringing to that Fall Out Boy reveal?
The best version of that joke is how intensely invested we are, and that applies across the board. That’s something we’ve applied to all of the writing on the show: to give the characters ridiculous wants and needs, but to have them sincerely want those things. At this point, it’s second nature to click into Dennis. When I’m playing a different character, the trick is to make sure I’m not doing the same things, especially if the character is already close to Dennis, like Jack in A.P. Bio. A lot of the fun of playing Jack was finding new and interesting ways to play frustration and anger, to play the straight man in a ridiculous situation. I really enjoyed that challenge with Jack, because I know what Dennis would do, and that’s kind of my go-to, what my body automatically does, just because I’ve been doing it for so long. I’m not really thinking about it at all. I’m just letting the gods speak through me. It’s like I’m channeling something.
The conspiracy-theory scene in this episode is a pretty peak example of a gang conversation. They’re encouraging one another, they’re yelling at one another, they’re talking over one another. At this point, how do you and the other actors prepare for a conversation like this?
We’ve been doing this so long with each other that I know exactly what I have to say to get the funniest reaction out of Kaitlin or Charlie or Rob or Danny. When Charlie is teeing me up, I know what he’s trying to get out of me. It’s become so automatic. We’re like a comedy troupe, like the Harlem Globetrotters or something; we communicate without even having to communicate. There’s a certain mind meld that happens with the five of us when we get on set together. We’re playing ping-pong with each other. It’s like, I don’t know if I’m gonna hit it to the right or to the left, I don’t know until I do it, and you just have to be ready to receive the ball wherever it goes. We can take the scene wherever we want to take it. That erratic-ness and constant improvisation and changing of the scenes is what I think makes the show feel spontaneous and unscripted, because it kind of is and it isn’t.
Do you remember what was improvised in that scene?
Pretty much everything other than the names of the terrorists. That was scripted, and us being really hung up on this idea that we said we were never gonna forget, that was the whole thing with 9/11, and now we’re forgetting. Everything else was loosey-goosey.
I loved the 9/11 conversation, because I think It’s Always Sunny has always been a surprisingly political show, like “The Gang Goes Jihad” episode, or when Dennis starts podcasting and he’s shocked to learn that there are two wars going on. Do you think of the show that way?
I don’t think of it as a political show. However, politics is such a big part of our lives that it inevitably ends up being this thing we satirize. We tend to satirize the extremes on either side of any issue, whatever it is. A lot of the fun of this particular issue was, the characters all consider themselves big-time patriots, and that manifests itself in really awful ways at times.
I also find that a lot of people who are hard-core patriots don’t really seem to understand what this country is supposed to be, and what it aimed to be from the very beginning. Some people have a really twisted sense of what it means to be a patriot. Of course, it’s extremely patriotic to be like, “We gotta never forget what happened on 9/11.” But, depending on which patriots you talked to, it’s also very true that those same people could, without much provocation whatsoever, find themselves wondering if the whole thing was a conspiracy, and feeling like the patriotic thing to do is to try to discover what really happened, you know? That was the funny thing to me about that joke, that we go from being super-upset about the reality of 9/11 and then talk ourselves into a complete circle where now we’re believing the whole thing is a hoax.
The coffee scene made me think about how there are so many times throughout It’s Always Sunny that it seems like Dennis absolutely could lead a normal life if he wanted to, but he chooses to be in Paddy’s Pub and not do any work, which I respect.
I had the exact same thought. It’s a glimpse into a possible reality if this guy could just not be his own worst enemy, if he just could get away from these horrible people. Maybe life doesn’t need to be this chaotic and hard. It’s what my character tried to do at the end of season 12, when he left to go to North Dakota and lead a normal life with this woman and his child. He lasted about five seconds before he had to come back to the bar. These people, they were made for each other, and they will always gravitate back toward each other.
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