Kaitlin Olson Somehow Got This Absurd It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Scene In One Take

Anyone who's ever watched "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" — or, frankly, the ABC procedural "High Potential" — knows exactly how funny Kaitlin Olson is. The actress, who earned fame and acclaim as "Sweet" Dee Reynolds throughout her time on "It's Always Sunny" — the show where she also met her husband Rob Mac, who created the series with co-stars Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day — is preternaturally hilarious, and her sense of comedic timing is second to none. Naturally, this extends to her physical comedy, which is why I'm not surprised that she nailed a tricky season 15 stunt in a single take.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly ahead of the episode, which is appropriately titled "Dee Sinks in a Bog," Olson got right to the point. "We shot an episode this season where Dee sinks in a bog, which I was very excited about, because it sounds hilarious," she told Derek Lawrence. "I also knew it was going to be miserable, which most of my hilarious things are."

I'll return to why and how Dee sinks in a bog in the first place shortly, but the fact is that Olson had to perform a scene where her character, while traveling through Ireland, goes looking for peat moss and falls into a bog, slowly sinking throughout the course of one long day. As Olson recalled, she managed to get these scenes right pretty much immediately.

"I go under, come up, open my eyes, and they fill up with whatever this bog is made of," Olson said of the bog set, which was actually built outside of Ireland (on a Disney lot, specifically). "I can't see anything, I could barely walk, I'm trying to remember where the holes are, I half-scream my lines. All I'm thinking is, 'I'm not doing this again, so don't trip and ruin it.'"

Olson, as she put it, knocked it out of the park: "Of course I nailed it on that first shot, thank you very much... I had Charlie [Day] with me, and he guaranteed that it was funny, so I was like, 'Great, we can go home.' And that was my most excruciating day on set this season — and there's something like that every year." (She's right that there's something physically insane for Dee to do every single year on "It's Always Sunny" — put a pin in that too.)

In the episode, which is named for Dee's accident, the whole gang finds themselves in Ireland as Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) tries to find his biological father ... and after Dennis Reynolds (Glenn Howerton) lands in the hospital, Dee flirts with a cute doctor and arranges to meet up with him at a later date. Unfortunately, the drafty old castle housing the gang uses smells terrible, so Dee goes looking for some peat moss in a bog to mask the smell; while she's taking selfies in the Irish wilderness, she falls into the bog and sinks. As people pass by, they either refuse to help her outright (like Mary Elizabeth Ellis' Waitress, who insists that Dee say her real name and leaves when she declines) or think she's a banshee screaming in the night (like Charlie and his long-lost father Shelley, played by Colm Meaney).

According to Kaitlin Olson, the "bog" was built in a secure area — specifically, a lot — but it still sounds like her filming experience was pretty awful. "They built a bog in a swampy area at the Disney ranch and filled it with some material that was supposedly safe," Olson explains. "I kept going, 'What is this made of?,' and they're like, 'Don't worry, it's organic!' Great. So, whatever got in every single orifice of my body was organic." She continued:

"It's the middle of the night, freezing cold, and I have to come out looking like a crazy swamp creature and run off into the woods. Right before we shot, the AD came over and said, 'When you come out, just be really careful because there are a bunch of holes in the ground. Don't step in them. And also stay really close to the bog, otherwise you'll run out of the shot and we won't be able to use it.'"

Again, it's lucky that Olson got it right so quickly, but it's also utterly unsurprising for anyone even slightly familiar with her work on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." Throughout the course of the show, Dee has been put into a back brace, beaned in the face with any number of projectiles, climbed through the sewers, run headfirst into a car, and gotten herself stuck in a waterslide, just to name a few of her ridiculous physical gambits. In 2018, the show's stunt supervisor spoke out about the whole cast's work, and he definitely highlighted Olson's best physical comedy moments.

The only person to earn Emmy nominations for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," as of this writing, is Marc Scizak, who worked on the series as a stunt coordinator from 2009 to 2019 across a whopping 96 episodes. (He was nominated in 2013, 2014, and 2015 and won none of the trophies, losing out to "Supah Ninjas" that first year and "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" for the following two). A year before he left the fictional version of Philadelphia seen on "Always Sunny," Scizak spoke to The New York Times about his work on the series and made sure to highlight one thing: Kaitlin Olson is a genius. (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist.)

"She is so incredibly talented that it is so hard to double her because nobody has her delivery, her body mannerisms, the ability to match her so well," Scizak told Sara Aridi, saying that Olson frequently asks to do her own stuntwork. "On bigger gags where she's going to get hurt, we have to kind of reel her back a little because she just goes for it."

Scizak specifically mentioned the season 12 episode of "Always Sunny" titled "The Gang Goes to a Water Park," where Dee and Mac, determined to use a waterslide that's pretty obviously meant for children, get stuck ... and a bunch of actual kids end up crushing them in the plastic structure. "We were literally dropping kids down on [Olson] as her face is getting smushed up against the top of the tube," Mr. Scizak said. "She didn't feel like it sold right and wanted to go harder with the kids." Of course she did.

Beyond that, Scizak brought up the infamous scene where Dee, attempting to shoplift a pair of shoes unsuccessfully, flees the store and runs headfirst into a car. A stunt double did perform that move initially, but Olson insisted on giving it a shot ... and Scizak said the stunt coordinator who worked on the show before him allowed her to do so. "She did that and it ended up being genius," he recalled. "It was amazing, and she does that stuff all the time."

At the start of that Entertainment Weekly interview, Olson said a sentence that felt like a thesis statement for her entire career: "As long as it's funny, I'll do it." That's definitely been true for her entire career, and long may she reign. "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is streaming on Hulu now.