Glenn Howerton Won't Stop

The last time I spoke with Glenn Howerton, he had just announced he'd be taking a step back from his duties on the thirteenth season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and had just started promoting his new NBC sitcom, A.P. Bio. But a lot changes in a year and a half.

Howerton, it turned out, hadn't left Sunny for good in any real capacity, and returned as Dennis Reynolds for six of the ten episodes that made up Season 13. He'll also be back this year, and maybe the year after that, too. That's alongside his work on A.P. Bio, which looked to be finished when NBC canceled the show after its second season earlier this year, before its own streaming service, now titled Peacock, picked it up for a third.

Today, we're sitting in the lobby of the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan, where Howerton worked as a bellhop for two years while he was studying at Juilliard, to discuss his current work on Always Sunny (and why it may never end), being brought back from the brink with A.P. Bio, and the disingenuous right-wing uproar over his now-canceled movie The Hunt.

GQ: You worked here before. Has it changed?

Glenn Howerton: Not at all. I got the job through Lee Pace, actually; he was a year below me at Juilliard, his roommate was Anthony Mackie. We all lived in the same dorms together. I didn't see Lee all that much but Rob Delaney and I worked many, many shifts together.

Is every hotel within walking distance of Juilliard an incubator for famous actors?

Probably, yeah. This place in particular. I think it was like a group of us that all kind of knew each other. So we would get each other jobs here. I think they were looking for that certain kind of tall, white dude. I thought it was cool to have a little earpiece. We got to talk into our wrists like FBI agents.

"Bellhop" always sounds to me like a bygone era kind of job.

I mean, there's always gonna be somebody who wants you to carry their bags.

So, bone to pick: Last time we talked you kind of had to trick me. No one knew you would still be on Sunny.

We talked last winter, right? It was during that wild snowstorm. I don't remember if it was tricking you, or if I honestly didn't know back then. What happened was, I decided to take a step back. I really did tell the guys that that was that, and I was done.

It didn't really have anything to do with A.P. Bio. That hadn't really come to me yet. At the time, I just needed a break after 12 years of doing Sunny. I wasn't feeling inspired, I didn't like the idea of coming into the writers' room, and not wanting to be there for my show, the show that I loved so much was such a devastating feeling. The guys were extraordinarily cool about it. Anyway they started writing it, and they came back to me like: Hey, we don't really know how to write the show without your character. Which I think is fair. I mean, I think that would be true of any of our characters, although it seems like my character over the years has become the de facto straight man sometimes

Maybe not all the time, but you certainly see the lunacy more clearly on occasion.

Right. And I don't think anybody wanted to take that role. I think they liked me, so they asked me if I would just come back and act in this season. And I said, sure. They wanted to respect the fact that I didn't want to be there all the time anymore. So they were like, “We figured out how to not have you in like four episodes. Will you do six?”

At that point, I'd already had some time off. And I think the thing that wore me out more than anything was the writing and editing, just having to be there so many months out of the year when I had other ambitions, other things that I wanted to do.

It's not anything to do with the show or anyone in it, it's just doing something for 12 years, it takes its toll no matter what it is, no matter how much you like it, no matter how much you care about it. It was just about wanting to have more time outside of the show. I think if there was a world in which I can write, produce, act in, and edit the show in three months, and have nine months to do whatever I wanted outside of that, instead of the other way round, I would still do that.

I'm sure one advantage you have that you didn't have a few years ago is writers who know the voice and the tone of the show so well. I think Megan Ganz improves everything she works on.

I can't begin to describe the degree to which she has added to the show. I think we needed her. You start to lose a little bit of objectivity, potentially. Charlie had just starred in, written and directed his first feature film, called The Tonto, Rob was still in post-production on the show that he had Charlie made for Apple. And I was coming off of A.P. Bio and working on The Hunt—God knows when that'll ever see the light of day—so we really need somebody like Megan.

I think with writing, the hardest thing to do is break a story. You know, to have an A-story, the B-story, the C-story, and find how they all weave together in a cohesive way. I don't know why, but that's the most difficult thing. And somebody that can do that is just, you know, dime a dozen. And she is one of the best at that we've ever had. We can leave her in the room with the writers, and she can break a story. She's the rare writer we can send her off on her own to do a draft that we don't have to rewrite the shit of.

Actually, can I throw in one more thing? The last thing I want to do though is to devalue the input of the other writers. David Hornsby has never gotten enough credit for making the show what it is. He was there for the original home movies. He helped us shoot them. He's been a touchstone for us. He's such a smart, fucking hilarious guy. And he was the first person who ever wrote a script that wasn't me, Rob, or Charlie. So I just want to throw that in there.

So with all these other projects, like last year, I'm sure you've talked now and again about ending the show for good.

We talked about it. At a certain point, we might look at this and go “Yeah, we did it and it's time to move on,” and all that kind of stuff. But I think at the same time the way I see it, we're more like a band than a show now, where we all go off into our side projects, but like, this is the band, and if we feel like putting out another album, we'll put out another album. At this point, it doesn't really make sense to end the show in any official capacity. It's possible that moving forward we move to sort of like a Curb Your Enthusiasm model if we can get away with it. Larry David actually pulled Rob aside at some kind of a function and told him "One piece of advice I'll give you guys: Don't ever end the show. Just don't end it!” I think he figured that out after Seinfeld. I think he was really burned out. But with Curb he knows he might want to come back to it years down the line.

So A.P. Bio got canceled and then picked up again by Peacock, NBC's new streaming service. Tell me about those few weeks.

Honestly, I'm still a little bummed about the way the show's been reported on because it's inaccurate. The truth is, the show did okay on NBC, but not great. But it always did really, really, really well on Hulu. We weren't this fledgling little thing. At one point we were the number three show across genres.

I don't wanna step into the business side of it too much. I don't really know what happened. I just know that our streaming numbers were great.

I'm thrilled. I enjoyed Season One but I feel like it really came into its own this year.

I agree with you. I think Season One was really funny. But Mike (O'Brien, A.P. Bio creator) really figured the show out by the time he started Season Two. I didn't fall in love with the show until Season Two.

Jack must be a really tricky character to write and to play. The trajectory demands that he needs to grow and get to know these kids. But it would be insulting the audience if you became fully like, "O Captain! My Captain!" Teacher of the Year, right?

I think I think that's always been the challenge with the show. The trick is being able to find those moments where he can show his vulnerability in his heart. But also still be like, Okay, now it's time to move on and get my book published. And I'm still better than this place. I do want to see you all succeed, but just so we're clear, I'm still better than you.

I'm excited for Season Three. I think Paula Pell's a genius and putting her in the classroom next year is such a great idea.

I'm going to be perfectly honest here. I'm going to be candid in a way that I've not been before: I was worried in Season One that Paula's character—not Paula, but her character—was too broad for the show. I even told Mike I was worried. And I was just flat out wrong. I just was flat-out fucking wrong. I've learned from producing other TV shows not to try and make the show my show. The good news is that would never happen with Mike because he's too confident in his sensibilities. There have been a few things along the way where I'm like, "Mike, I don't know, man, this is a little... I don't see how this works." And he's like, "It works. Trust me, it works."

I think the trick with Helen is obviously it is a big character. But everything about her comes from a place of such sincerity. She truly adores the school and the kids and Principal Durbin.

I one hundred percent agree. I think my concern at the beginning was like, this is just wacky. All my alarm bells go off on I see wacky for wacky's sake. But it wasn't that. It was coming from this insane, energetic positivity. One of the things I love about the show, in general, is that my cynical character is surrounded by so many positive people who have such a deep love for the school. And I love that the comedy in the show comes so much from this gleeful sincerity that I think we're lacking a lot of the time in real life. You know, nobody wants to commit too hard to anything if you're being made fun of.

It also helps that the kids are more comfortable in who they are than Jack is a lot of the time.

Totally. And also those actors I think in Season Two came back with even more confidence as performers. They all leaned into their characters more this year.

I love them all but I think Jack's fucked-up mentor relationship with Heather is one of my favorite things.

Man, let me tell you, Allisyn Ashley Arm, she's not even a little bit like that character in real life. I mean, she's doing like some real fucking Gary Oldman shit. It's crazy, man. She just transforms.

You mentioned T‌he Hunt earlier. Can we talk about how you felt when it was pulled indefinitely? Fucking Donald Trump tweeted about it.

I was mad, and I was upset. There were right-wing pundits that were railing on the movie, even though they hadn't seen it, saying how despicable it was that Hollywood would make a movie where elitists are hunting conservatives or whatever. And I was upset because I was like, They haven't seen the fucking movie! How can you have such a strong opinion about a movie you've never fucking seen?

But then I realized that doesn't matter, that they haven't seen it. It's not about that. They weaponized it because they wanted to. My guess is they wanted to distract from gun legislation. And they wanted to point the finger at the left as promoting what they're fucking promoting. They don't want restrictions on guns. They don't want common-sense gun laws. At this point, the Trump administration was already making an argument that it was violent video games and violent movies that are causing mass shootings.

And so then the trailer came out and... I mean it was like we just fucking handed them a birthday present with a bow on it saying, here's a perfect example of the bullshit argument you're trying to make. They knew that it didn't make any sense that they're making that call. It didn't matter to them. I'm sorry but nobody, nobody, none of the pundits that were talking about the movie were actually outraged. Watch the trailer. It doesn't even make sense based on that. I'm not giving away what happens in the movie, but based on the trailer you've got average Americans being hunted by the elites: The average Americans are the fucking good guys there. Maybe they're the heroes of the movie. It's too bad because the movie's fucking great. I saw it. It's awesome.

I always wonder if these pundits making these arguments are sad and exhausted by it all, when deep down you know they can't really believe half the stuff they're saying.

I don't know how exhausting it is. But I hope their souls are slowly shriveling. Anyone who fucking does that kind of shit. I hope they know. I think to some degree, you have to make yourself believe Hollywood made a movie where elites are hunting average Americans. And that we were advocating for that. I hope they on some level knew that that wasn't a sincere argument. But maybe it's a state where the conscious mind is warping reality but the subconscious is giving them back pain and growing some sort of cancer inside their body.

But they're making a lot of money.

Absolutely. It's hard to look past for some people

Last time, we talked about Sunny's place in culture and how you're sidestepped a lot of the "problematic" criticisms. Last year you did a #MeToo episode that actually really worked. Are you sometimes worried the hammer's going to fall?

I don't want to give us a zero credit. I think the reason we get that pass sometimes is because our core audience understood what we were doing right from the beginning. We're not advocating for this behavior or putting it out there for the sake of it. We're doing quite the opposite. We're exposing this type of behavior for what it is, and watching that kind of behavior fail. Also, you know, we're grandfathered in at this point. We never received the sort of massive attention that would cause that sort of scrutiny to happen.

It's funny to me that we've all sort of flipped a little bit. When the show started, we were still in this era where content was being more policed by conservatives. Now we're living in an era where content, at least in terms of entertainment, is policed by liberals. It used to be like, "Oh, you can't say that, we're a good Christian country, and we don't want to expose our children to this sinful behavior." And now, it's like, "You can't say that. That's offensive to me."

There are a lot of shows and entertainers that have waded into the territory you have and just botched it.

Right. The problem is when something is done poorly, it is offensive. Where's that joke coming from? When you make a joke that belittles a group of people or a belief system, that's harmful. Now, we can make a similar joke on our show that's always meant to belittle the mentality of the type of person who would make that first joke.

How did you feel about New York when you were living here?

New York City's a tough place. I have to be careful here because I'm easily overwhelmed. I'm a sensitive guy. That sounds strange but that's the truth. I really am extremely sensitive. And I and I think it goes into my characters. I think my characters are overly sensitive as well, which is why they put on that narcissistic front

New York's kind of a litmus test sometimes isn't it? Some days I'm truly psyched to be like, riding the subway with a bunch of people from all over, going all over. Sometimes I fucking hate everyone and want to be in a soundproof box.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I do love the energy here. For me, it's actually not the people. It's the traffic and the construction. And the sirens. Oh my God. I have a dog's ears. Everything is so fucking loud to me. When a siren goes by and I don't see people cover their ears I'm like, What are you doing? It pierces me to my soul. My mom's that way, too. She's easily overwhelmed. So I've learned to meditate. It has to be part of my life otherwise, I will go fucking insane.

But on the other hand, I'm an introvert. It's really easy for me to isolate myself and I have to be careful not to do that in places like New York. At home, it's not a problem. We always have people over and I've got my kids. It's a loud house.

Yeah, sometimes something like stepping out and just getting some food can be tough if you're in a funk.

Right, and that's hard for me too because I'm not a foodie. I don't remember the names of restaurants I've been to. I obviously recognize the difference between a really, really, really great meal and, like, a salad. It's just that it doesn't matter as much to me as it matters to some people. It's easy for me to eat really healthy because I don't care. I can just eat a fucking salad for every meal, as long as I've got coffee.

I think I'm the same way. I'm down to go to a great restaurant but also I've definitely eaten spinach out of the bag for lunch when I couldn't be bothered.

I've done that: Eaten spinach like it's wet potato chips. [Laughs.]

Q&A

The star of A.P. Bio talks about his near-miss with becoming a Marvel superhero, leaving It's Always Sunny, and what he would've changed about the cult comedy's early seasons.

Originally Appeared on GQ