Talking to THR, DeVito was asked if he’s ever balked at anything that the show’s creators have asked him to do—a gamut of indignities that starts with “emerging, greased up and naked, from a couch-womb,” and just kind of expands out from there—and says there was only one. Reiterating a story he also told in the run-up to the season, DeVito says that, one fine April morning, he was preparing to film the first episode of one of the show’s seasons, only to be told that series creators Rob Mac, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton had decided to change directions and send over a new script for him. Said new script contained much of the typical It’s Always Sunny bar-based shenanigans—except for the Frank plotline, which involved DeVito’s character being arrested, beaten, and repeatedly sexually assaulted while in prison. Which is, y’know, pretty dark, even for Sunny. “Midway through,” DeVito recalls, “I said, ‘I’m not going to do this. There’s no way I can do this. This is really crazy.’” He said he was on the verge of calling his lawyer when he got to the script’s final page, which ends with one of the abusive cops in question threatening one more assault, before whispering “April Fools, motherfucker” in Frank’s ear—at which point, DeVito realized he’d been handed the new script on April 1.
According to DeVito (who has some past prank experience), he did at least get his co-workers back, albeit in a way that sounds a little less bleak than “We’re going to make you pretend to be raped and beaten on national TV.” DeVito recounts to THR that, at the show’s next appearance at FX’s Upfronts, he “got there early, and we all had rooms that FX had given us on our own, so I talked to the manager, and I said, ‘Look, don’t give them their rooms. Give me a small room with one bedroom and get me a bunch of cots and tell them that the place is filled.’ The guy did it and he played it to the hilt. They were all in the room, and I was in a closet with a bottle of tequila and glasses watching them react to the fact that this guy is telling them there’s no room in this hotel and this is the room that FX booked for them and they all had to sleep together on cots.” In a moment we really wish had been filmed, Rob Mac was apparently about to get on his phone to complain to the “big shots” about the treatment. (It’s pretty easy to imagine, right?) But DeVito was merciful, choosing that point to emerge from the closet to reveal the prank. “I had ’em good,” he happily notes. “They did deserve it.”
