Danny DeVito at 80: The Secret Behind Hollywood’s Most Unstoppable Career

‘You know, we were hippies’

While cutting hair during the week and learning makeup at night — early multitasking that would become a trademark of his career — DeVito was experiencing a cultural awakening at AADA. “I was reading Of Mice and Men and Ibsen and learning about Shakespeare and Arthur Miller,” he recalls. “And I made a bunch of good friends.” They’d pop over to Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village to catch emerging artists like Bob Dylan and Richard Pryor. He quit hairdressing, moved to Manhattan and enrolled at AADA full-time.

DeVito’s first paying role was in a touring production of the play The Contrast in 1965. When the cast performed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, he also helped build a new amphitheater on the property, and Michael Douglas was on the work crew. They bonded instantly.

“The guys wanted to do a beer run, and Michael had a motorcycle, so he volunteered to go,” says DeVito. “He said, ‘I need somebody to carry the beer while I’m driving.’ So I go with him. He’s got hair down to his butt. I did too. You know, we’re hippies. Anyway, we’re on our way to the motorcycle, and I had some pot, and I said, ‘Do you get high?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ So we got high. He let me try driving the bike. I couldn’t do it because my feet couldn’t reach the ground.”

Humor and honesty created an enduring link between the Italian kid from Jersey and the son of Hollywood royalty. “We had a lot of fun and then maintained our friendship over an incredibly long period of time,” says Douglas, reached by phone in Majorca, Spain. “When I graduated from college and ended up in New York, he and I were roommates. He just was a special guy. And I think it was also that I was a little self-conscious in terms of being an early nepo baby, and he never treated me as a movie star’s son.”

‘I cooked, and she ate’

DeVito was acting regularly in off-Broadway productions, which ended up being serendipitous. One evening, a castmate’s friend, the actor Rhea Perlman, now 78, came to see their show. The three of them went out afterward. “We hit it off,” DeVito says. “We liked off-Broadway stuff. We went to movies all the time. We made little movies together — short films. We had a lot in common, and we fell in love. A nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn and an Italian from New Jersey: I cooked, and she ate.” She moved in with him shortly after they met.

Even in those early days, DeVito was directing as well as acting. In fact, Douglas remembers thinking of him more as a director than an actor, “since I really wasn’t sure how he was going to work out as an actor, because of his size,” he says. “But he never makes you aware of him being short. He just embraces you with his charm and sense of humor.”

‘We had five years of bliss’

Douglas was responsible for DeVito’s first big break. A budding producer, Douglas took director Miloš Forman to see an off-Broadway production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which DeVito played Martini, a childlike mental patient given to vivid hallucinations. When it was time to choose the actors for the film version, “Danny was the first person cast,” says Douglas. “Miloš saw him and said, ‘Yah, we have Martini now.’ ”

Then, in 1978, Taxi premiered. The show was a massive hit and established DeVito’s reputation as a brilliant comedic actor. “We had five years of bliss,” he says. “Everybody on it is the best in the world.” The cast stays in regular contact, he adds. “Marilu [Henner] makes sure we have our monthly Zoom. So I know she had a play in New York, and Judd [Hirsch] is always working. Everybody’s got stuff — we make sure we’re caught up.”

After Taxi ended in 1983, he had his pick of film roles and went on to star in such ’80s hits as Terms of Endearment, Twins and Romancing the Stone. The last reunited him with Douglas, who played the lead character and was also a producer. “He saved me a lot on Romancing,” says Douglas. “He came up with a lot of hilarious things that were an important part of making the picture an action-romantic comedy.” In one improvised bit, DeVito’s character, Ralph, an antiquities smuggler, is being chased by even bigger crooks. “He turned it into this thing where he’s running away, not looking back, shooting his gun over his head. It was exciting but also had the laugh in there.”

Meanwhile, DeVito began directing films and creating magic at his production company, Jersey Films, which made such contemporary classics as Erin Brockovich, Get Shorty and Reality Bites. (Jersey Television followed; Reno 911! is its biggest hit.)

His greatest coup was Pulp Fiction. He had read Tarantino’s script for Reservoir Dogs and wanted to produce it, only to learn it was already being made. So DeVito quickly arranged a meeting with the fast-rising auteur. “I said, ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re gonna do next, but I want it at my company,’ ” DeVito recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got another story about these intertwining characters.’ I said, ‘I don’t wanna hear it right now, I just wanna make a deal with you.’ So that’s how I made a deal for Pulp Fiction.” (As important: DeVito played a key role in insisting that the studio stay with lead actor John Travolta rather than its pick, Daniel Day-Lewis, and the rest, as they say…)

Along the way, DeVito has made it his business to support family, friends and those deserving of a break in the sometimes unkind film world.

“He has changed so many lives in so many ways,” says Charlie Day. “My wife and I were at his daughter Lucy’s wedding recently, and I was looking around that room of people: all of us at Sunny, John Landgraf, who used to work with Danny and now heads up FX, and Pam Abdy, who runs Warner Bros. She started out working for him as an intern. It speaks to a quality he has, where he has just lifted up so many people in his orbit.”

‘Frank Reynolds got ’em back!’

A little over 20 years ago, DeVito and his kids caught the first season of a gritty little FX comedy, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Landgraf was looking for ways to increase viewership. Day says, “We were batting around potential names to add in. John thought Danny and his sort of edgy comedic sensibility fit well with us.”

Day remembers having lunch with DeVito and fellow Sunny stars and writers Glenn Howerton and Rob Mac before DeVito came on board in Season 2. “It felt like something out of Get Shorty, with him ordering for everybody and telling us all sorts of funny, odd stories, and the next thing we knew, we had him on set in a pair of long underwear, and we were pretending to slap each other.”

As the unhinged Frank Reynolds, father to Howerton’s and Kaitlin Olson’s characters, DeVito shone for some of the show’s more outrageous bits, such as being slathered in slime (in “The Gang Gets Quarantined,” Season 9, Episode 7) or sewn into a couch naked (in “A Very Sunny Christmas,” Season 6, Episodes 13 and 14).

DeVito changed the show and the lives of its stars. “Once Danny had attached to the show, it legitimized what we were doing, in a way,” Day says. “But also, Danny’s just such a great influence as a person, as a parent, on how to have a long-lasting Hollywood career, and how to raise children in Los Angeles, and how to interact with fame and fans. I don’t think we could’ve gotten a better mentor.”

They made just one mistake.

Early on in Sunny’s run, the producers played an April Fools’ joke on DeVito, giving him a script so over the top, it was too much even for him, “in terms of performing very graphic, specific, sexual acts in much detail for almost the entirety of the episode,” says Day. “He was like, ‘What is this? Why did it take this turn?’ ” Of course, nothing was filmed, everyone laughed, end of story.

A short while later, FX sent them all to Washington, D.C., to make the East Coast press rounds. When they arrived at the hotel, the manager informed them that Mac, Howerton, Olson and Day were booked in one small room with a single bed and a few cots. FX had gotten them each a hotel room, naturally, but DeVito had arrived early and persuaded the manager to go along with his gag. Then he hid in the closet with a bottle of tequila and some glasses, listening to them fume. When he heard Mac on the phone starting to complain to FX, he waltzed out. “Rob Mac sees me and says [into the phone], ‘I’m sorry, I apologize, f---ing DeVito,’ and he hangs up,” says DeVito, laughing. “Frank Reynolds got ’em back!”

“We thought after that, Let’s not with the pranks,” Day says. “He’s gonna win.”

‘The older I get, the better I get’

Two decades later, they are preparing to release Season 18 of Sunny (August 17), and DeVito is also returning to the big screen to reprise his role as the cantankerous Grandpa Eddie in Jumanji: Open World, due out on Christmas. “The older I get, the better I get for that part, so just bring it on,” says DeVito. “Give me that cane.”

As for home life, DeVito does his best to take care of himself — drinking green juices, limiting alcohol, working out daily, puttering in his yard and hanging out with friends — saying he wants to keep doing his showbiz thing as long as he lives. “Longer,” he jokes. “I love work! Yesterday I spent all day editing. Today I’ve got writer meetings.”

But relationships remain his touchstone. He and Douglas talk all the time and meet up whenever they’re in the same hemisphere. Same goes for Day: “I talk to Danny a couple of times a week, even when we’re not filming. My wife, Mary Elizabeth, and Rhea went to New York to see some plays; we’re close with his kids. My son probably thinks we’re related to Danny.”

“No matter what happens in your life, the most important thing is having family and friends,” says DeVito, “reliable people in our lives who we can talk to, who we can open up to, who we can rely on to be there. I’m very fortunate.”

He’s been combining work and loved ones his entire career, since those early days making short films with Perlman. So he’s overjoyed that two of his children, producer Jake and actor Lucy, are now running the successor to his original production company. Coming this fall from Jersey Films 2nd Avenue is Drag, a horror-comedy starring, among others, Lucy DeVito. “It’s really, really out there,” says DeVito. “I like out-there stuff, you know. Obviously.” He’s just as thrilled to talk about his other daughter, Gracie, who did not follow her parents and siblings into the family business. “She went to RISD, got her master’s at CalArts and is a wonderful artist,” he says proudly.

DeVito and Perlman separated in 2017 but are still married and plan to remain so in a sort of anti–War of the Roses, talking daily and getting together for weekly meals. “We’re always over at her house,” DeVito says. “We see the grandchildren together, that kind of stuff. So that’s a good relationship.”

For all his ambition and drive, he tells me it’s loved ones who continue to make his world go round. The delightful “meeting” that had gotten him up at 6 that morning? “A Zoom with my 1-year-old grandson eating oatmeal.”