It's Always Sunny's Kaitlin Olson Really Ate An Entire Cake For The Gang Broke Dee
Kaitlin Olson of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" doesn't get enough credit for her comedic skills or her willingness to really give her all for a performance, whether that means injuring herself for one of the show's many ridiculous stunts or shoveling vast quantities of baked goods into her mouth. In one of the series' darker episodes, "The Gang Broke Dee," the gang berates Olson's character Dee for eating a cake that she found in the garbage after Charlie had thrown it out. She's also drinking hard liquor straight from the bottle and chain-smoking cigarettes, so she's given up on life in a way that she never had before, and Olson really sells it. There was probably water or soda in the whiskey bottle, but she had to actually house all of that cake, and apparently they did quite a few takes.
In an interview with Yahoo TV back in 2013, Olson shared the story behind some of her wilder "Always Sunny" moments and revealed that she ate a whole lot of cake for "The Gang Broke Dee" — almost enough to break Olson! There's a lot of intense eating on the series, ranging from Dee chomping down on a Philly cheesesteak in "Mac and Dennis: Manhunters" to Charlie's deranged sub sandwich destruction in "Hundred Dollar Baby," but it sounds like the cake really takes the, uh, cake.
Eating an entire cake for laughs
In the interview, Olson explained that in order to really effectively get the comedy of the scene across, she had to actually eat the cake, which ideally wasn't actually taken out of a trash can somewhere:
"I ate quite a bit of cake. Yeah. I'm glad you asked about that, because you see someone doing an eating scene, and normally you're just moving food around on your plate and pretending to eat, because you can shoot it 50 times, but I had to devour that cake. We probably shot that scene six or seven times. I believe I ate an entire cake."
Dee really goes to town on the cake in the scene, talking with mouthfuls of the stuff hanging off her lips, and while it's pretty gross, it's also pretty funny. She ends up taking slightly better care of herself after she starts doing stand-up and succeeding at it, but there's still a lot of gross-out humor in the episode at her expense, including a whole bout of drinking and vomiting on an airplane. As far as putting herself in harm's way for the sake of the show, eating all of that cake must have been a cakewalk compared to some of her serious on-set injuries or the time she was covered head-to-toe in fake blood. Olson is devoted, even if she had to have one serious stomach-ache after all of that sugar.