Anyone who’s ever watched “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”—or, frankly, ABC’s “high-potential” procedural—knows exactly how funny Kaitlin Olson is. The actress, who gained fame and acclaim as “Sweet” Dee Reynolds during her time on “It’s Always Sunny”—the show where she also met her husband Rob Mac, who created the series with co-stars Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day—is pre-emptively hilarious, and her comedic timing is second to none. Naturally, this extends to her physical comedy, which is why I’m not surprised she pulled off a complicated Season 15 slam dunk in one sitting.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly ahead of the episode, aptly titled “Dee Sinks in a Swamp,” Olson got straight to the point. “We shot an episode this season where Dee sinks in a swamp, which I was really excited about because it looks hilarious,” she told Derek Lawrence. “I also knew it would be miserable, which most of my hilarious stuff is.”
I’ll get back to why and how Dee sinks into a bog in the first place, but the fact is that Olson had to perform a scene in which her character, while traveling through Ireland, searches for peat moss and falls into a bog, slowly sinking over the course of a long day. As Olson recalled, she was able to nail these scenes immediately.
“I go underneath, I come up, I open my eyes, and they’re filled with everything this swamp is made of,” Olson said of the swamp set, which was actually built outside of Ireland (in a Disney parking lot, specifically). “I can’t see anything, I could barely walk, I’m trying to remember where the holes are, I’m kind of writing my lines. All I’m thinking is, ‘I’m not doing this again, so don’t trip and ruin it.'”
Olson, as she put it, knocked it out of the park: “Of course I thought so in that first picture, thank you very much… I had Charlie [Day] with me, and he assured me it was funny, so I was like, ‘Great, we can go home.’ And that was my most excruciating day on set this season — and there’s something like that every year.” (She’s right that there’s something physically insane for Dee to do every year on “It’s Always Sunny” — put a pin in that, too.)
