Luckily for the “Sunny” creators — and fans — DeVito was instantly amused by the show. The only people who thought it was funnier than the “Batman Returns” star were his own children. “Rhea and I and the kids watched the show,” he recounted. “I loved it. It was f***ing outrageous, just the way they are, okay. And we all, you know, I immediately said, ‘Yeah, this is, like, an amazing show. You should, whatever you’re going to do with it,’ I don’t know.”
But it wasn’t until Landgraf called him again six months later that DeVito considered joining the cast. When the FX exec told the actor that they wanted him on the show, he had only one prerequisite. “All of a sudden [Landgraf] calls me up, he says, ‘Would you be interested in being on the show?'” DeVito added. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If they come up with an organic character, something that was not just Danny DeVito coming into a show, if it made sense,’ and blah, blah, blah. All that kind of stuff.”
So the “Sunny” creators — Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, and Charlie Day, who also co-star in the sitcom — got to work on a character for DeVito. And boy did they deliver: Frank isn’t just Dennis and Dee’s estranged father, he’s a misanthropic billionaire who has chosen a life of debauchery and filth after leaving his cheating wife and rejecting polite society. “It was a good character,” he went on. “And so they wrote me in. And, of course, my two kids are tall and blonde. And so I had to have eventually, as we all know, my wife was a w****. And so, you know, so that was my first involvement in the show.”