Day is always sunny

[1]

He is best known for his comic timing in movies like Horrible Bosses and Reno 911!, and the hit television series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Charlie Day became a popular face in India thanks to his bumbling, weird character Charlie Kelly in the TV show that he acts in, writes for and co-produces. After years of tickling our funny bones, Day will be seen playing his most serious character till date, Dr Newton Geizler in Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming sci-fi flick Pacific Rim.
Speaking about what it was like to make the transition from a man-child character in It’s Always Sunny… to playing a scientist in Pacific Rim, Day says, “I guess it’s nice to finally graduate to a man (laughs). Although I think there’s a bit of man-child in Newt (Dr Newton Geizler). Certainly there’s some man-child in Guillermo with his boyish enthusiasm about everything, and I do think that the character’s a little bit based on Guillermo and his love of these monsters. So it looks like I’m probably a man-child again! I haven’t connected the dots on those two characters yet though. To me, they couldn’t be any more different. You know, one can read.”
With a body of comic work behind him, Day was set up for the task of balancing his funny image with a character unlike anyone he’s played before, without disappointing his steady fan-following. He says, “I knew that the studio wanted me to bring some comedy to the movie and my greatest fear was that they were going to start filling the script with a bunch of fart jokes and that I was going to seem really out of place in the movie. Guillermo was always pushing me myself to be almost as straight as we could during the time that I didn’t have humour that usually comes from me being myself. I think the biggest challenge for me was never making it so funny that it felt out of place in this movie but also hopefully, not being so straight that the audience is disappointed that they feel like they don’t get to see me at all like they usually see me. But mostly, I was excited about the opportunity of not being funny from time to time.”
Director Guillermo once said that Day is famous for playing stupid characters; so he wanted to have him play someone smart instead. While Day agrees with Guillermo, he is clear about the distinction between him as the writer of It’s Always Sunny… and him as the man in front of the camera. “Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an incredibly dumb man, and Dale Arbison in Horrible Bosses was not a far stretch from that character. So I’m sure some people will go into the theatre with a bit of trepidation, seeing me playing a scientist, but you know, Charlie Day writes all those lines for Charlie Kelly, so I don’t know... in some ways, this character’s a little bit more like the guy who writes it than the guy who appears in it.”
Of all the hilarious, often mindless characters Day has played so far, he would pick Charlie Kelly as his favourite any day. “I think I’ll never get over Charlie Kelly. I mean any guy who loves glue and eats cat food just to go to sleep is an interesting character and I’m enjoying still playing that one. But really, I’m fortunate enough to play really good ones, work with good people and even the little voice of art with Pixar’s movie Monster’s U, is such a great little character that they came up with and all I had to do was speak.”