Summer is officially on the way according to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator Rob McElhenney, who just showed off his lean, fit physique at a shirtless pool party that he hosted for the players from Wrexham FC—the soccer team he owns in partnership with his movie star pal Ryan Reynolds—along with his wife and Always Sunny co-star, Kaitlin Olson.
“The Gang throws a Pool Party in Nevada for the Greatest Football team on Earth,” McElhenney wrote on social media when he posted the photo, mimicking the title format of each episode of his long-running sitcom.
The photo prompted a whole lot of replies from Sunny fans speculating as to whether the Wrexham guys will be showing up in a future episode of the show, while others jokingly compared the shot to the soccer-themed sitcom Ted Lasso. And then, of course, there were the thirsty responses to the shirtless athletes, not to mention McElhenney himself, whose body has been the subject of plenty of conversation over the years.
Ever since McElhenney transformed his body from “Fat Mac” to ripped for the thirteenth season of Sunny, he has been nothing but forthright about the work and dedication that goes into sculpting that kind of physique, making it crystal clear to anyone watching the show that maintaining that kind of body is practically a full-time job.
“I’m fascinated with the presentation of the human body, and the way it’s been presented for the last 30 or so years, and what’s considered attractive versus what is considered realistic,” he said in 2021. “For Sunny, I spend a lot of time in writers’ rooms with comedy writers, and our job is to tear each other apart and to tear the culture apart—what’s going on in the cultural conversation, and how can we satirize that in a way that nobody else is really doing? I just thought: Well, I want to try to build a body that’s absolutely ridiculous and truly impossible to keep up unless you devoted your entire life to it.”
He went on to explain that a balanced lifestyle—including finding time in his packed, rigorous schedule for small pleasures—helps him keep the mindset required to stay physically fit: “I consider myself a very disciplined person. I eat really clean. I work out hard. I go to work really hard. I spend a lot of time with my family. I take my kids to school every day. I try to stay as regimented as possible. But if I don’t have whatever that thing is for people—that cookie, that pizza, or that manhattan I like to drink every single night—I will be miserable. And I know that about myself. So that’s actually a sustainable lifestyle for me.”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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