Charlie Day Wants You to See Past Charlie Kelly

For 16 years—and counting—viewers have expected one thing when they hear the name Charlie Day: energy. Frantic, manic energy. Best known for his role on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as Charlie Kelly, the illiterate janitor who shares a bed with Danny Devito and occasionally eats cat food, Day is associated with waving his hands above his head, raising his voice to a pitch higher than most would dare to attempt, and sometimes doing both at the same time. But in Amazon Prime Video's I Want You Back, that zany weirdo gets the chance to change things up and win love as the lead in a new romantic comedy.

Day knows that after playing a character for so long (Sunny is now the longest-running live-acton sitcom in TV history), people may only see that character. It's a blessing and a curse—but he's just asking for a little bit of time. "I feel like, OK, if you give me the hour and a half, by the end of the movie you’ll be seeing a different character," he says with a laugh in Manhattan's Whitby Hotel. "You might, for the first 15 minutes, only be seeing Charlie Kelly, and that’s fair—I get it."

When Day walks into a room, it's natural to expect what we've seen on screen. But in this room, his energy is different; while you can still tell it’s the same guy behind his Covid-friendly double mask, he speaks in a tone that’s calm and measured. He recognizes that his coin has two sides: yes, the cynic who's always fit so perfectly in Sunny, but also the romantic who can play the charming, heartbroken everyman at the forefront of a rom-com.

For 20 years, Day has been in a relationship with actress Mary Elizabeth Ellis (who plays The Waitress, Kelly's object of unrequited love in Sunny; they married in 2006, the year after the show debuted). To play Peter in I Want You Back, he looked prior to that, tapping into past memories of heartbreak and the pain of wanting someone to want him.

Day says that if he'd had a "Tom Brady-like existence," it might have been trickier to remember things like romantic rejection, but for him, that wasn't the case. “It’s funny,” he says. “You don’t forget those feelings of loneliness, and wanting to be seen, and wanting someone to…”

He pauses for a second to think. “You know, you want to love someone, but what you really want is you want someone to love you,” he continues. “You want someone to say, 'I see you, I think you’re wonderful, and I want to be with you.'”

It's a bit jarring to hear something so tender and earnest coming from the guy who we once watched order "milk steak" and a side of jelly beans during a date on Always Sunny. (Kelly is "the opposite of a romantic," as Day puts it.) But it also makes sense in the context of I Want You Back, which lets the guy you'd typically expect as the rom-com sidekick finally get a love story of his own.

The film begins with Day’s character, Peter, finding himself single after his six-year relationship with Anne (Gina Rodriguez) comes to an end. Jenny Slate's Emma finds herself in a similar position, so she and Peter hatch a plan to break up each other's exes' new relationship. The mission puts Peter in direct competition with Emma’s ex (an uber-positive personal trainer played by Scott Eastwood) and Anne’s new boyfriend (an artsy-fartsy teacher played by Manny Jacinto). Whether or not you're in possession of a six-pack or sexy artist vibes, you might see yourself in Peter's anxiety about measuring up to the guys around him.

“Just like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, he’s this living darling who you root for immediately," Slate says of her co-star. “He plays the fine line between confidence and a respectable amount of self-doubt, the constant internal questioning of, I think I'm doing pretty well...but...what if I'm not? As a person, [Day] asks challenging questions of himself, and his character in the film ends up having to do the same.”

Filming I Want You Back in Atlanta during the pandemic separated Day from his and Ellis' son, Russell, who was born in 2011. This kept him emotionally raw, in part because he knew his son missed him. “I missed my kid, and I was stressing about whether it was worth being there or not,” he says.

But thinking about his son led to reflecting on his own experiences in the dating world, and how Russell still has all of that ahead of him. “He’s gonna experience so much pleasure, and he’s going to experience so much pain,” Day says. “And certainly the pain of heartbreak, I can only speak for myself, was some of the worst, most devastating… there’s worse pain out there. But I think when you’re a teenager, and you go through heartbreak, it really hurts! And you don’t expect to feel it so physically.”

But as painful as it might be, it's also vital to the human experience. “That’s the joy of life,” he says. “If we didn’t have sadness, we wouldn’t know what happiness is.”

Day wants to spend more time in the rom-com lane going forward; he idolizes what the man Slate compared him to—Tom Hanks—has done in every movie, but especially that Sleepless in Seattle/You’ve Got Mail run of the ‘90s. Day felt such a chemistry with Slate from their first moment together on set that he imagined she could be the Meg Ryan to his Hanks. He wants to do “3, 4, 5 more” movies with her.

The hope is that viewers will be able to sense the heartbreak Day is channeling. That they'll relate to that feeling of being alone; that feeling of wanting more. But he also knows that no matter what, people are always going to see Charlie Kelly in any performance he gives. “Because apparently I look and sound just like the guy,” he says with a laugh.

I Want You Back is a sharp, funny take on modern romance, where Day shows he can be someone totally different. And if you can't see past Charlie Kelly, then that's your loss.