Rob McElhenney, star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, recently opened up about a significant low point in his acting career—being cut from the 1997 crime thriller The Devil’s Own, which starred Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford.
“That was one of the most humiliating and terrible experiences of my life because it was my first acting job in a movie,” McElhenney shared during a recent appearance on Hot Ones.
“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.”
Set in the late ’90s, the action thriller follows a police officer (Ford) who unknowingly takes in a young house guest (Pitt), later discovering that he is an Irish Republican Army terrorist on the run.
McElhenney continued, “The movie’s coming out, and I notice I don’t get an invite to the premiere or the friends and family screening.
But I’m still just starting out — I’m like 19 or something, 18, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.’ Of course, for a year, I’m telling everybody I got this movie; nobody believes me because I hadn’t worked at all doing anything else.
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. They were all A-players and I was a D-player on the ground. I wasn’t even a player, I was on the editing room floor.”
Despite this setback, McElhenney eventually made his official feature film debut the following year in 1998, appearing in Steve Zaillian’s A Civil Action, which starred John Travolta and William H. Macy.
