In the episode “Mac and Charlie Write A Movie,” Olson had one highly physical gag that her bosses definitely wish they had handled differently. In that episode, Dee is an extra on an M. Night Shyamalan film. She is supposed to lie still and pretend to be a murdered corpse, but she consistently messes up the shot by attempting to steal the spotlight. For this hefty portion of the episode, Olson was drenched in fake blood, and it was far from fun to work in.
“You can’t even go sit in a chair without sticking to everything,” Day explained on The Always Sunny Podcast.
To make matters worse, most of her shots were lying face down on concrete. Unfortunately, the series creators and their producers failed to consider how uncomfortable Olson would be in the fake blood when they made the shooting schedule for this episode.
“The way we would shoot that now would be completely different,” McElhenney said. “At the time, we didn’t even think about the fact that there was four or five different scenes in four different locations with her wearing all of that makeup, that blood. So she put it on in the morning, and had to wear it all day.”
Howerton speculated that Olson’s shooting schedule was so nightmarish that day because the episode’s producer wanted to shoot the episode “in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible” regardless of the actors’ comfort, and that they were still “young enough to let the producer get away with that.” Of course, the showrunner and his fellow collaborators have since learned from their mistakes. As the longest running live-action sit-com on the air, you’re bound to make a few errors along the way — the important thing is that you don’t keep making them.
“We would never do that now,” Howerton added. “We would shoot all of her stuff in as short amount of time as we possibly could.”
