Rob McElhenney, who plays gay conservative character Ronald “Mac” McDonald on comedy series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was asked by a fan to shout “gay rights!” to which he responded: “GAY MOTHERFUCKING RIGHTS!”
The clip has gone viral on Twitter with over 45,000 likes and 8,000 retweets. Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Charli XCX are among other celebrities who have gone viral for loudly voicing their support for the queer community. In an interview with Deadline, McElhenney said he has “always been part of the gay community” because he was raised by two women and has two brothers that identify as gay. “It’s just always been a part of my life,” he said.
In the 12th season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, McElhenney’s character came out as gay after it was insinuated for 11 seasons that he was closeted due to his obsession with men’s physiques and his religious views on homosexuality. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, McElhenney said the character’s homosexuality was “born out of his intense, ultraconservative, right-leaning principals” and that it worked “retroactively” when looking back at previous seasons. “We always take whatever viewpoint any character has to the extreme,” he said.
“We have certainly mined plenty of comedy out of the extreme right and the extreme left. We were looking at Mac at one point, and I was like, “He is such an arch-arch Catholic conservative when it suits him, and when it doesn’t, he drops that.”
“And most of the people I know in that camp tend to be fairly homophobic. So we began going down that road: Let’s satirize that hard Christian conservative who is also intensely homophobic. OK, so what’s the next step from there?”
McElhenney said the show rarely panders to the audience, but because Mac was in the closet and “doubled down on his homophobia” to make it seem like he wasn’t gay, they decided to make him homosexual to “poke fun at the hypocrisy”.
Via GayTimes
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