It’s Always Sunny’s Charlie Day: ‘Some film critics act like you’ve murdered their grandmother’

Charlie Day is in limbo. It’s been a few weeks since the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star’s directorial debut, Fool’s Paradise, was released in American cinemas, and the 47-year-old has the vague look of shell shock about him. Reviews have been bad – scathingly so. Speaking to me now, a month before the actors’ strike, Day is unsure whether his eccentric Hollywood satire was a misunderstood gem or an abject mistake. “Every time I think about the movie, on a day-to-day basis – or even hour to hour – I have a different relationship with [it],” he begins, soberly. “It’s absolute madness. Highs and lows... One moment it’s joy and pride, thinking ideally it can become a cult classic. Then it’s ‘I never want to think about this again.’”

Right now, though, it seems to be all he can think about. I sense that the film, along with the critical trouncing it received, hangs over our conversation like a black cloud. Fool’s Paradise was always going to be a tricky sell, of course. It’s an off-beat throwback, following a man who is accidentally propelled to Hollywood stardom overnight. Day, as the film’s ostensible lead, is entirely silent throughout – a bold gambit for a performer whose high-pitched, sandpapery voice is his most distinctive quality. In Sunny, it regularly explodes into a shout or a full-blown shriek. Today, this livewire energy has been taken down a few volts.

It was Day’s work in Sunny – one of the great sitcoms of the modern era, now in its 16th season – that made his name, both as a writer and as an actor, playing the illiterate, rat-bashing, glue-huffing, cat-food-eating pub janitor Charlie Kelly. In Hollywood, he has often been cast as oddballs or neurotics. The sci-fi epic Pacific Rim saw Day play the enjoyably incongruous comic relief; leading turns in comedies Horrible Bosses and Fist Fight and romcom I Want You Back were roundly well-received, but failed to capture what makes him such an idiosyncratic force on TV (both in Sunny and as the co-creator of the superlative Apple TV+ sitcom Mythic Quest). He’s meanwhile cultivated a sturdy reputation in animation: that peppery voice of his can be heard in Monsters University, The Lego Movie, and, most recently, as Luigi in The Super Mario Bros Movie. (Calls for a Luigi-centric spin-off are as much a testament to his wiry performance as they are to the public’s allergy to Chris Pratt.)

It’s not quite gloom that shades Day’s face today, but a kind of deflated calm. Our interview is fast becoming an autopsy. He hadn’t intended to read reviews of Fool’s Paradise, but ended up taking a long peek at everything. “It’s like slowing down to look at a car wreck on the side of the road,” he says. “When someone has a beautiful review, and sees it for what you intended it to be, suddenly you feel great. You say, ‘Oh, right. This person gets it.’ And then two seconds later you read someone who acts like you’ve walked into their living room and murdered their grandmother. It just drags you down. But that’s what I’ve signed up for, right?”

I am, to be honest, relieved that he has mentioned the reviews so readily. The elephant in the room has been duly acknowledged; now we can tie it down, run our hands over its tusks. Day’s film is difficult to assess. At a glance, it comes across as an overly broad satire, one that picks its targets well but fails to make the most of Day’s comic prowess. What complicates this criticism – something that many reviewers failed to pick up on – is that this was a deliberate ploy on Day’s behalf. It’s ambitious, but in a way that obfuscates its own lofty intentions.

In Fool’s Paradise, Day plays a mute drifter recently released from a psychiatric hospital, who comes to be known, after a misunderstanding on a film set, as “Latte Pronto”. He then finds himself thrust into the limelight by chance, when his oblivious behaviour on the set is mistaken for purposeful thespian stylisation. He’s rushed through the Hollywood machinery at triple speed, and hazed through a cycle of Tinseltown phonies: actors, directors, producers, agents and PR reps – played by everyone from Kate Beckinsale and Jason Sudeikis to John Malkovich and the late Ray Liotta.

“I didn’t want to make a movie exploring how a guy as funny as Mr Bean or Charlie Chaplin becomes a movie star,” Day explains. “With them, you understand – they have so much charisma in every gesture they’re doing. I wanted to make a movie where a man who really has nothing to offer becomes a movie star, just by virtue of time and place and how he looks.”

Day, on the other hand, has arrived at where he is through some mixture of charm and gumption. The child of a music history professor and a music teacher (he has indulged his inherited musical flair countless times on Sunny, and while hosting Saturday Night Live), Day started out as an outsider to the entertainment industry. As a twentysomething art history graduate and jobbing actor living in New York, he befriended a number of other aspiring actors, including Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton. Together they made their own no-budget home movies, often shooting in an unlicensed apartment above a hotdog restaurant. After moving to Los Angeles, Day caught a break: one of the short films he, Howerton and McElhenney had made became a TV pilot, which eventually became Sunny.

The first seven-episode season of Sunny has a sort of scuzzy, underground feel to it. “When we first put Sunny out, we got horrible reviews,” Day recalls. “They just completely misunderstood the intention of the comedy. It was the good grace of our partners at [US network] FX, understanding the show and liking it, that kept us alive.” For its second season, Sunny held fast to its abrasive sensibility but brought in one hell of a ringer in the form of Danny DeVito, who miraculously agreed to slum it in the role of depraved, wealthy patriarch Frank Reynolds. The series’ original premise – four detestable people who own a faux-Irish pub in Philadelphia, PA – ballooned into nearly two decades of anarchic character-driven brilliance. Day describes the series as a “creative playground” and “the most fulfilling, wonderful creative experience of my life”. The latest batch of episodes may be the strongest in years.

In the wake of Sunny’s success, its various cast members have all sought to broaden their horizons. Kaitlin Olson, who plays the desperate, put-upon “Dee” Reynolds, has fronted her own sitcom, called The Mick. Howerton, Sunny’s vain, psychopathic Dennis, recently drew rave reviews for his dramatic role in Blackberry. McElhenney, who plays the puffed-up simpleton “Mac”, is now best known as the co-owner of Wrexham AFC alongside Ryan Reynolds. And DeVito is, well, Danny DeVito.

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For Day, his passion project was Fool’s Paradise. He’s still weighing up whether it was worth it. He thinks about an earlier cut of the film, and how eager he was to “not give the audience anything” – insisting on making his character non-verbal. “There were times in the editing room where I’ve said, ‘Listen, man, why are you doing this to the audience?’” he recalls, with an air of forensic self-doubt. “‘And why are you doing it to yourself? What is this instinct to be so challenging? At least give them your voice. At least be a guy who says funny things in every scene.’ But then there’s the side of you that says ‘No. The entire point of the satire is to not be the charismatic, entertaining character they need and want. You’ve made this choice, you’ve taken this big swing, and you have to live with it.’” It’s rare to see any creator wrestle with their own instincts this openly; it’s clear he lives with it in a very literal sense.

All of it – the bad reviews; the analytical to-and-fro taking place in Day’s mind – makes a lot more sense when you hear about Fool’s Paradise’s troubled production history. Day first wrote the script in 2014; at the time, the project was called El Tonto and was, he explains, “much more about race”. In that version, Day’s character was taken in by a Latino roadside orange vendor and his family, while his (in this version, possibly imagined) Hollywood success is ignited when he is cast in a movie in which white actors play Native Americans. “Much of the commentary [concerned] the fact that I’m white, and that I continue to fail upwards,” Day says. “[And] the idea of wealth and power in Hollywood, and the communities that are overlooked. It was a very different film.”

It was this script that Day filmed in 2018. By 2020, he had finished assembling a cut and was seeking a distributor. “I couldn’t find a studio that felt comfortable dealing with a satire that dealt this much about race – coming from me,” Day continues. “And maybe rightly. Maybe I didn’t have enough authority to tell that family’s storyline. Who knows.”

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At this point, Guillermo del Toro, one of Day’s “favourite directors and closest friends” (who had previously cast him in Pacific Rim), took a look at the film. Racial politics aside, the Shape of Water filmmaker reckoned that the “heart and soul of the movie” lay not in Day’s character, but instead in one played by The Hangover’s Ken Jeong, who now serves as Fool’s Paradise’s protagonist of sorts. So Day worked through the pandemic to “rewrite and retool” the movie; in 2021, he undertook extensive reshoots. El Tonto was dead; Fool’s Paradise was what stood in its stead.

Even now, Day clearly feels ambivalent about the changes. “When I read a review about someone really loving Ken’s performance, it feels wonderful. Because I do like this version and I do think it will hold up eventually. But if I read a review about the satire being somewhat toothless, it stings – because I feel like I had to take all the teeth out of it.”

He floats the idea of releasing the original version “down the road at some point”. But maybe not. There’s a side of him that just wants to move on. Fool’s Paradise will likely never connect with a broad audience in the way that Sunny has, of course. But history may be kinder to it than the critics were. And despite his equivocations, Day is not going to apologise for his film any time soon.

“I could just go through life and only make horror films and sports movies, things that are commercially safe and narratively consistent,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to put the time and effort into making something that people don’t have a strong opinion about – for better or for worse.

“Which isn’t to say, on the next go around, I would challenge the audience even more,” he adds, hastily. “Probably I would back off a little bit, and say, ‘OK, OK, OK. This time we’ll give you a plot.’”

The Zoom is ending, and I can’t help but feel like nothing has been resolved. Day is flying off to Ireland in a few hours with his wife, the Sunny actor Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and their 11-year-old son. It might be the perfect chance to escape Fool’s Paradise. But I’m still not sure if he wants to.

‘Fool’s Paradise’ is available on digital platforms from 28 August