Here’s Why Dennis Isn’t Named ‘Glenn’ on 'It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’
Like many sitcoms before it, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a hybrid system for naming its characters, some of whom take the names of their actors while others don’t — it may come as a surprise that Mary Elizabeth Ellis doesn’t have “Waitress” on her driver’s license.
Back in the early aughts, what would later become the longest-running live-action sitcom in American television history started as a short film that three friends shot on a shoestring budget of $200. Rob McElhenney, sick of the constant auditioning and regular rejection of being a working actor in Hollywood, recruited his roommate Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day to film what eventually became the storyline of the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season One episode “Charlie Has Cancer,” playing characters that they named after themselves and that resembled their own personalities, but were far away from the maniacs they would become two decades later.
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When the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia short film grew into a sitcom, Charlie Day remained Charlie, Rob McElhenney continued going by his nickname “Mac” onscreen, but Glenn Howerton, originally and obviously named “Glenn” in the short, suddenly started playing a character called Dennis. As Howerton would later explain, once he realized his character was a sociopath, he knew he needed to distance his own personality from the role. Y’know, because of the implication.
Anyone who has watched or listened to a single episode of the The Always Sunny Podcast knows that Howerton is, arguably, the furthest away from his character in terms of personality out of the original three members of the Paddy’s Pub Gang, given that he has no outstanding warrants for sex crimes, he doesn’t regularly refer to himself as a God and he can, presumably, leave his house without his tools.
Unfortunately for Howerton, and despite his best efforts to delineate the many vast differences between Dennis and himself starting with the name, Howerton seems to be the one OG Always Sunny gang member who has a hard time shaking the sociopath typecasting when he does non-Always Sunny projects. Around the release of the biographical comedy-drama BlackBerry in 2023, in which Howerton played an amoral megalomaniac based on the real-life former BlackBerry CEO Jim Balsillie, Howerton said that he’d love for Hollywood casting directors to start calling when they have less Dennis-y parts for him.
“I would love to play a character that’s not so intense all the time,” Howerton told Vanity Fair, though he admitted, “It’s my own fault, because the truth is, I’m drawn to that as a performer.”
Is it fair to say that, despite the name-change, Howerton can’t get Dennis out of his… system?
