‘You know, I’m not Brad Pitt,” Danny DeVito says, lest there be a risk of mistaken identity. “And back then, I used to wear a cape and hat, and I had hair down to here. So I was like this creature walking in the door.”
DeVito is recalling when, in 1971, he met the parents of his girlfriend at the time, now his wife of 40 years, Rhea Perlman. At 5ft, Perlman is a crucial two inches taller than her husband. Yet despite dressing remarkably like the Penguin he would play in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns 21 years later, DeVito was as delightful then as he is now, so he instantly charmed his future in-laws. Perlman’s dad, Phil, worked in a dolls’ parts factory, but was a big film buff, and he said to DeVito, who was an unknown at the time: “Promise me if you make it in Hollywood, you’ll put me in the movies.”
DeVito kept that promise. Up until his death in 2015 Phil was a regular in his son-in-law’s films, including Throw Momma from the Train, Man on the Moon and Out of Sight, the last of which DeVito produced through his company, Jersey Films. (Phil was also a regular on Cheers, in which Rhea famously played the sarcastic waitress Carla.)
“So Phil goes from working with doll parts to working with George Clooney! The transformation of Phil Perlman,” DeVito says, still tickled by it all.
Today we are talking about yet another DeVito family production, the extremely enjoyable Disney+ animated series Little Demon. Executive produced by Dan Harmon, it tells the story of a 13-year-old girl, Chrissy (voiced by DeVito’s 39-year-old daughter Lucy), who lives with her single mother (Aubrey Plaza). When Chrissy gets her first period she — cue female-puberty-metaphor alert — develops evil powers and finds out that her father is, in fact, Satan (voiced by — yes — Danny), who is hoping to drag his daughter into the devil business. Rhea makes an appearance, and the series is executive produced by Jake DeVito, their son. (Their other daughter, Grace, is an artist.)
Advertisement
“If you can’t tell, we all like to work together,” Lucy says dryly. The three of us are talking by video chat, with the DeVitos in their respective homes in Los Angeles. As well as doing plenty of her own stuff, Lucy has worked alongside her father in the long-running sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Dumbo. She grew up on her parents’ sets; some of her earliest memories are watching her mother act in Cheers. So it’s not a huge surprise that she became an actress, although she tried to resist this pre-ordained fate.
“Thematically, it’s similar to what happens in Little Demon, in that there were times when I was, like, ‘I’m my own person, I can do my own thing.’ And yet, my dad is a powerful force,” she says, while Danny nods solemnly at being compared to Satan. Did she consider changing her surname when she started working so she wouldn’t always be seen in relation to her father?
“Sometimes, yeah. But at a certain point I was, like, ‘No, this is awesome. My last name is DeVito, and this is f***ing great,’” she says.
“That makes an Italian dad happy,” Danny says. If there were any doubt that being a DeVito would indeed be awesome, Lucy describes them as “a family that likes to hang out in our sweatpants, eat cheese and watch movies on a Sunday, and everyone’s welcome to come over and hang out.”
I tell Danny that when I interviewed him almost a decade ago, he gave me the haunting parenting advice: “The thing about kids is, if you raise ’em right, they leave you.” But he seems to have found a way around that, I say, as his children left him, but he still works with them.
Advertisement
● 28 best cartoons for grown-ups
“That’s where my craftiness comes in. But I am really annoying. Every day I call the kids and say: ‘What’s up? What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ But you can’t latch on to your kids, you gotta let them grow wings and all that stuff,” he says, and then notices my stricken look as I think about my own children’s future wings.
“Ha ha ha! You feel it! It’s an emotional thing for parents. But you gotta!” Was the parental set-up in their home similar to the one in Little Demon, with him as the naughty parent and Rhea as the disciplinarian?
“I think so, but we were really blessed because I never felt my kids were taking advantage of us. I used to say: ‘Look, anything you want to do, if you want to have a little nip, smoke some pot, have a party with friends — you do it in my house. I don’t care if your friends sleep in the hallway or on the lawn, there’s no leaving the house.’”
This sparks a reminiscence between father and daughter about how strict he was about not letting his children see films that featured violence and swearing. “You were, like, ‘I made Pulp Fiction!’ And Gracie and I said: ‘Can we see it?’ And you were, like, ‘Uhhh maybe,’” Lucy says with an eyeroll while Danny chuckles away. (As well as Pulp Fiction and Out of Sight, DeVito produced Erin Brockovich, Get Shorty, Gattaca and Man on the Moon. He may not be Brad Pitt, but the man is a genuine movie god.)
Advertisement
Despite being delightful, DeVito is best known for playing grouches and villains: the bully Louie De Palma in the sitcom Taxi, which ran from 1978 to 1983 and launched DeVito’s career; the nefarious Ralph in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile; the Penguin; Harry Wormwood in Matilda, which DeVito directed and starred in alongside Rhea; Frank in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; and now Satan. Does he get all his evilness out at work?
“Yeah, I really enjoy it when the characters have a twisted dark side. It’s like having a stone in your shoe, something that bothers you so you take it out on others or yourself. Plus I’m from New Jersey, you know. Ha!” he says.
One of the many reasons DeVito is so beloved is that he always seems to be enjoying himself immensely, and it’s a joy that is infectious. This must be one of the reasons that his friends recur in his films as often as his relatives. DeVito has been making films with Michael Douglas since 1975, when they made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Douglas, DeVito says in a brook-no-argument voice, “is definitely going to be in Little Demon, whether he wants to or not. Mikey has such a great voice for a cartoon.” He has already bagged another BFF, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom he acted in Twins (1988), who makes a very amusing appearance in the cartoon. Do people go crazy when they see him and Schwarzenegger out having brunch?
“We tend to see each other at his house rather than go out. He’s doing a series in Canada, but now that we old guys have these little devices,” he says, waggling his iPhone around, “we can randomly FaceTime each other, which is kind of a trip.” But when he goes to Schwarzenegger’s for dinner, don’t Schwarzenegger’s donkeys, who are the stars of his Instagram, steal the food off DeVito’s plate?
“Exactly! The animals just roam around all over the place — they’re coming to getcha! Ha ha! It’s, like, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, it’s a horse.’ ‘A HORSE?!’ Arnold loves his animals, and he still smokes his stogies.”
Advertisement
DeVito and Schwarzenegger have been promising to work together again for years. Will it happen? “Trying to! Lucy and Jake and Arnold’s peeps are looking for something for us to do, because we love working together and we still got a lot of gumption in us,” he says. I say that I’d pay good money to watch the DeVito family reality show, with all of them eating cheese in their sweatpants, Schwarzenegger popping by with his donkeys.
Danny recoils, laughing, at the thought. “That is not gonna happen,” he says, chortling. “The DeVito reality show?” Lucy says. “You’re looking at it.”
Little Demon is on Disney+
