The Character Deaths In It's Always Sunny That Glenn Howerton Regrets
The "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" gang has been at fault for quite a few deaths over the years — from a guy shooting himself in a Russian Roulette game arranged by Frank, to Mac and Dee letting a kid drown at a water park. If you count animals, Charlie's got the highest body count in the gang, as he's murdered not just the many men rats in Paddy's Pub, but the women and children rats too. Then again, the implied horrors that went on in Frank's old sweatshop might put Charlie's rat genocide to shame.
But for Glenn Howerton, who plays the psychopathic Dennis Reynolds, one of the deaths that haunts him was only kind of the gang's fault. In a 2017 interview he talked about how he regretted killing off Roxy (Alanna Ubach), a successful yet unstable sex worker whom Frank tries to marry in season 7. She unexpectedly drops dead from a random heart attack (though it might've been provoked by Frank's marriage proposal), and is presumed dead without any attempt at resuscitation. As Howerton lamented:
"She was just so funny, and it was such a funny character. I know the fans responded to her too, but just from our perspective there's a part of me that wishes we hadn't killed her. I'm sure we could discover that she's alive, and it wouldn't be that far outside the realm of possibility."
He's not wrong exactly: the only confirmation we get that she's dead is Frank checking her pulse, but despite his "Dr. Mantis Toboggan" alter ego, Frank's medical opinion isn't reliable. The episode ends with them callously leaving her body in the apartment hallway, so it's possible that someone else discovered her and actually tried some CPR. Over thirteen years later, it doesn't seem likely the character will return for revenge, but Roxy fans can certainly still hope.
Glenn Howerton also regrets killing off Dennis and Dee's mom
The other death Howerton regrets was one that definitely wasn't the gang's fault: Barbara (Anne Archer), Dennis and Dee's mother and Frank's diabolical ex-wife. She dies off-screen in season 3, but luckily she made a big impression throughout the first two seasons. Most notably, there's the scene where she admits to having cheated on Frank and having falsely told him that Dennis and Dee were his biological children. She shows zero regret throughout the scene, telling Frank, "I'm sorry, would you rather I had them aborted?" She turns to a stunned Dee and Dennis and asks mockingly, "Children, would you have rather been aborted?"
She's one of those delightfully evil characters that are fun to hate, which is why it's admittedly surprising that "Always Sunny" chose to kill her off so early on. "A lot of times I actually regret killing Dennis and Dee's mom in season 2, because that was a really funny character," Howerton explained. "And I find the longer we go on, the more we have a desire to do at least a few episodes here and there that feel grounded in the emotional reality of the characters, and when you want to do that it's nice to have family members to draw on."
The good news is that Dee and Dennis had their biological father, Bruce (Stephen Collins) to work with in subsequent seasons, as well as Mac's troubled relationship with his dad or the father issues Charlie confronts in season 15. Although "Always Sunny" perhaps wasted one of its biggest long-term opportunities to explore why the gang turned out the way they did, standout episodes like "Mac Finds His Pride" and "The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain" proved there was still plenty of ground for them to cover.