Rob McElhenney’s First Acting Job Was ‘The Most Humiliating Experience’ of His Life
Rob McElhenney’s time working on the 1997 action-thriller The Devil’s Own led to McElhenney unknowingly entering his own personal hell.
At some point, everyone who finds success in the entertainment industry must undergo the regrettable but inevitable “welcome to Hollywood” moment when they learn what show business is really about. For so many young actors and actresses — especially those who ever worked on a Miramax movie — that experience is unspeakably grim, so It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star and creator McElhenney should count himself lucky that he only got metaphorically shafted by Columbia Pictures when he booked his first-ever film role.
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McElhenney just completed the “Wings of Death” challenge on the popular talk show Hot Ones, an experience that he found significantly less painful than the time when the makers of The Devil’s Own cut their 19-year-old supporting actor out of his very first movie without warning him not to invite his entire extended family to opening night:
During the talk, Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked McElhenney to tell him which was the more humiliating experience — famously flying out to film a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine only for his friend and partner Ryan Reynolds to cut him out of the movie, or booking his first movie role when he was barely out of high school, shooting five separate scenes with A-list talent and telling everyone he knew about his big break, only to show up to opening night (but not the premiere) of The Devil's Own to find himself downgraded from “supporting actor” to “audience member.”
“Not even close by a country mile, (it’s) getting cut out of The Devil's Own,” McElhenney answered. “That was one of the most humiliating and terrible experiences of my life, because it was my first job — my first acting job in a movie. I got to do a scene with Harrison Ford, I got to do a scene with Brad Pitt, I got to do a scene with Julia Stiles, Rubén Blades, all these incredible actors.”
“So it was like four or five different scenes,” McElhenney said of his performance in star-studded but ultimately forgettable thriller about an IRA member (Pitt) and an American police officer (Ford) who get wrapped up in a black-market weapons deal to the mild amusement of late 1990s moviegoers (McElhenney).
“Then, the movie’s coming out, and I notice that I don’t get an invite to the premiere or the friends and family screening,” McElhenney recalled. “But I’m still just starting out, I’m like 19 or something, 18, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.’”
And, in his teenage excitement, McElhenney made the mistake of telling everyone he knew that he was about to be a movie star and to see The Devil's Own on opening night. “Of course, for a year, I’m telling everybody I got this movie, (but) nobody believed me because I hadn’t worked at all doing anything else,” McElhenney remembered. “And then, we go to the movie — all my friends, everybody, my family buys tickets — and I’m just not in it at all. They cut me completely out of the movie, didn’t give me a heads up, nothing.”
While that may seem callous, I worry that Evans didn’t ask appropriate follow-up questions for us to get the full picture and understand the reasoning for McElhenney’s omission. For instance, did the Devil's Own producers let McElhenney do his own makeup?
