FUNNY GUY. RIPPED DUDE. MODERN MAN.

WE FIRST NOTICED HIM 16 YEARS AGO as an above-average-looking guy on a quirky basiccable comedy, but none of us really saw Rob McElhenney until The Dance. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia had been on for 13 seasons at that point—this was 2018—and viewers had come to expect the odd and unexpected from “the gang.”

But nobody expected the sight of a shirtless McElhenney leading a partner in a four-and-a-half-minute rain-soaked, extremely dramatic pas de deux—a scene best described, to quote one viewer at length, “as pure art…one of the most beautiful [four and a half] minutes I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t think I can recall a dance sequence that ever left me in tears. What’s interesting about perception is how we really don’t know each other. When I say ‘each other,’

I mean everyone on this great green spinning shit-wheel. Everyone has a secret or a talent or something that is inside of them that needs to come out. That was the first time I really looked at [McElhenney] in a way that was much different.”

Us too, and what we saw wasn’t just another above-average-looking guy who’d recently transformed his body—losing 70 pounds and getting shredded into eight-pack shape—but a man of hidden depths and boundless ambitions. As Sunny costar Danny DeVito whispers toward the end of The Dance, “Oh my God…I get it.”

McElhenney, now 44 and a father of two, has been busy working through those depths and ambitions ever since. which he cocreated and stars on with wife Kaitlin Olson, will enter its 15th season (thus officially beating for the longest-running live-action TV comedy in history) when it returns (hopefully) later this year. He also cocreated and stars on the Apple TV+ sitcom that answers the question “What would happen if you crossed with ?”; its second season starts on May 7. Somehow he managed to find time to buy Wrexham AFC, a fifth-tier soccer team in Wales, with Ryan Reynolds (that’s right, the actor and Aviation Gin co-owner), who also happens to be the teary-eyed stan quoted earlier.