Rob McElhenney Says There’s ‘No Argument’ That Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day Are the Most Talented ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Cast Members

Despite being the It's Always Sunny star and producer with the Emmys, the personal production company and the high-profile bromance with Deadpool, Rob McElhenney isn’t going to disagree with anyone who thinks that his co-conspirators Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton are the top talents of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia team. 

And here we thought no one needed a wild card.

When McElhenney, Day and Howerton first shot the pilot for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, they budgeted $100 for the entire project and used a digital camera that Howerton had bought with the money he made starring in the universally panned and short-lived That ‘70s Show spin-off That ‘80s Show. At the time, McElhenney envisioned the project as a way for the three friends to secure steady acting gigs without attending endless, soul-crushing auditions, and it’s doubtful that any of them expected the potential show about a bunch of Philadelphia assholes who own a bar together to ever earn them Emmy nods — which is for the best, because it didn’t.

Today, however, McElhenney has a number of burgeoning side projects outside his flagship franchise, some of which the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences have deigned to recognize with a golden statuette. After McElhenney’s Welcome to Wrexham took home the Emmy for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program at this past weekend’s ceremonies (the second such award McElhenney and his Wrexham team have won), one Always Sunny fan on Twitter lamented that the show’s brightest stars still haven’t had their time to shine on TV’s biggest night.

In the viral tweet, the fan apologized for claiming that Howerton and Day are the two most talented actors on Always Sunny, but McElhenney himself chimed in to clarify that there’s no apologies necessary — after all, he has an Emmy.

For the sake of McElhenney’s marriage, we’re going to assume that he thought the tweet about the talent rankings on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia only covered the three original members of the Paddy’s Pub gang, and that it wasn’t explicitly omitting McElhenney’s dear wife and co-star Kaitlin Olson from the podium of top It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia talents. Olson was nominated in the Outstanding Guest Actress in A Comedy Series for her work on Hacks at this past weekend’s Emmy Awards, her third career nomination, but she didn’t yet take home her first win as Jamie Lee Curtis claimed the prize for her performance in the depressing and traumatizing “comedy” series The Bear.

While it’s easy for McElhenney to self-efface when his non-Sunny projects are netting him the industry acknowledgement he deserves, it’s still noble of him to implicitly name his two friends and the Emmys’ worst enemies as Always Sunny’s most talented cast members. Maybe he’ll let Day and Howerton hold his Emmys sometime now that he has enough for both of them.