Danny DeVito on Booze, Nude Scenes, and S&M Sex at the White House
Image courtesy of the FX network.
The dirty old man, like the Chupacabra, tends to be more wishful-thinking myth than flesh-and-blood reality. It’s one of those clichés that people repeat because it makes growing old seem less frightening. But the sad truth is, age rarely makes somebody dirtier. If anything, they become more repressed and conservative. And then there’s Danny DeVito, the exception that proves the rule. DeVito is a legitimate dirty old man—not in a playful way, like the kind that make church folk smile and children roll their eyes with mock disdain. Seriously dirty.
It wasn’t always that way. During the first half of his career—the 80s and 90s— DeVito was dirty in a middle-of-the-road, made-for-TV kinda way. Whether directing movies like Throw Mama From the Train and Death to Smoochy, or playing roles as diverse as “the short guy” and “the really short guy” in Tim Burton movies, DeVito created gallows humor for Middle America; dark stuff, but the suburban mall version of dark. But over the last few years, the 64-year-old DeVito has transformed into one of the most giddily subversive, hilariously dirty old men working in Hollywood. The evidence is everywhere. On the FX sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia—which ends its fifth season next Thursday, December 10th—DeVito portrays the lecherous and deadbeat dad Frank Reynolds, who is so staggeringly abusive that it’s almost impossible to list his many misdeeds. They include (but are not limited to) coaxing his son into “no rules” sexual favors, using a staple-gun to create a stigmata, showing up at an orgy for the buffet, collaborating with a homeless guy to commit “fecal forgery”, tricking his children into eating human meat, and attempting to bang his sister-in-law at her husband’s funeral.
The non-fictional DeVito is just as gloriously offensive. Last June, while being interviewed for a Philadelphia news show, he waved around an open beer can and asked the female reporter if her skirt offered “easy access.” It was a public spectacle reminiscent of his drunken (or at least hung-over) ramblings on The View just a few years earlier, where he gave Rosie O’Donnell a lap dance and railed against President “Numbnuts” Bush. The loveable goof who once made your parents laugh on Taxi has apparently grown up to become the lovable pervert who scares the shit out of your parents.
I spoke to DeVito after he’d returned from a family vacation in Paris, which he’d documented on Twitter with several photos of gnarled troll feet visiting French monuments, an allusion to his Troll character in The Nightman Cometh musical from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which he demanded payment for access to a “boy’s hole.” In other words, all conversations with DeVito invariably lead to filth.
Tags: America, Danny DeVito, deadbeat dad, Donnell, Frank Reynolds, Hollywood, ldquo, Mama, Paris, Philadelphia, philadelphia amp, rdquo, Rosie, Sunny, Tim Burton, tim burton movies
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Tags: America, Danny DeVito, deadbeat dad, Donnell, Frank Reynolds, Hollywood, ldquo, Mama, Paris, Philadelphia, philadelphia amp, rdquo, Rosie, Sunny, Tim Burton, tim burton movies
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