Of all the TV couples getting about these days, Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are up there with the nicest and most good and pure and lovely.
The two crazy kids got together on the set of It’s Always Sunny, which we don’t need to tell you but we will anyway that McElhenney co-created and Olson stars in, back in about 2006-ish while the show was filming its second season.
The duo got married in 2008, and are just coming up on their tenth wedding anniversary; a romance that has yielded two tiny kids and an ocean of Sunny episodes. As well as, y’know, consistent marital bliss and whatnot.
What you might not be aware of, however, is that after they first got together, the couple decided to keep it secret from their It’s Always Sunny castmates for a full year before finally breaking the news to them.
Olson appeared on the Armchair Expert podcast with fellow actor and close friend Dax Shepard. Shepard and Olson both came up together in Los Angeles working with the legendary comedy troupe The Groundlings and have remained close ever since. By extension, McElhenney and Shepard also became friends.
But after Olson and McElhenney started dating, Olson spoke of how they worked hard to make sure fellow cast mates – including McElhenney’s then-actual roommate Glenn Howerton – didn’t catch on to what was really happening, to the point where Howerton fully believe McElhenney was leading some sort of wild life on the weekends.
It was great, because he was living with Glenn [Howerton] at the time, and this was all a secret, and Glenn would come to work jealous. He was just like, ‘Rob is just like out there at bars just like meeting people and every bar he goes to he meets someone and spends the night.
It was so much fun. And terrifying. We were so scared they were going to hate us.
Olson also revealed that it has she who made a move on Rob initially, and that he wasn’t quite as sure about their relationship as she was initially.
Like, once I fell in love with him, I realised that I was deeply in love with him in a way that I hadn’t been in love with him before. And then we started secretly dating, and he really just wanted to be casual, but I had this hubristic confidence that this person is completely in love with me but he has no idea. It wasn’t even a game. It was just like, ‘you have no idea that you are completely in love with me. You want to have it casual and just date, and yet you’re calling me every Friday night and you’re spending the night on Saturday night and you’re seeing me on Monday morning.’
So there you go. A muscle-bound freak and a bird who looks like a bird. A true match made in heaven. Or, at the very least, a match made in South Philly where it’s always sunny.
Beautiful stuff.
