Eating eggs almost killed Danny DeVito during his Broadway stint.
When the pint-size actor starred as a 90-year-old furniture salesman in “The Price” in 2017, his character chowed down a hard-boiled egg in every performance, often spraying some of the snack on co-star Mark Ruffalo.
“I never got sick of eating eggs — I mean, that was like, Arthur Miller wrote that! But in the very beginning in the previews, I was eating the whole egg, and the first couple nights, you know how it is eating a whole hard-boiled egg,” DeVito, 73, told Page Six at the Asbury Park Music and Film Festival on Saturday. “So I started eating just one half of the egg, and it worked out better. I threw the other half of the egg in the bag — it saved my life and got an extra laugh.”
It’s not the only iconic scene the actor has had involving eggs, which he cracked are “for some reason always in [his] pocket” while working: In the Season 7 premiere of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” DeVito’s character, Frank Reynolds, famously offers “an egg in these tryin’ times” while driving a limo.
DeVito revealed that filming on the upcoming 13th season of “It’s Always Sunny” will begin this week, and that while he’s game for anything, one of his most infamous episodes actually embarrassed him briefly: being “birthed” from a couch, naked and covered in oil, in the Season 6 episode “A Very Sunny Christmas.”
“They’ve teased me about things I didn’t do, but usually I do everything that they write, which is pretty much as far out as you can get,” he said. However, he forgot that when he was set to appear stark naked in the scene that it was a party scene — meaning there would be more people on set than the usual cast of Kaitlin Olson, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton and Rob McElhenney.
“There’s all these people and my naked ass crawling out of a leather couch,” he said. “And Kaitlin’s just staring at me for what feels like forever instead of saying her lines, so I had to do it again.”
Though there’s almost nothing DeVito hasn’t done onscreen, the Asbury Park native — who hopes fans spend his New Jersey-declared holiday “having fun, maybe getting physical” — has yet to do one thing in real life that he’s always wanted to accomplish.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted a New York driver’s license,” he said. “In New Jersey we drive a lot, in New York you don’t drive as much … When I was a kid I had relatives in Brooklyn, and I always wanted a New York license plate on my car. I never, ever got one. But there’s still time!”