🚨 STOP EVERYTHING — Kaitlin Olson just stunned Hollywood with the role nobody saw coming! 🔥 Best known for making audiences laugh in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Olson is now stepping into the dark, dangerous world of ABC’s explosive new crime thriller — and early reactions are calling it the performance of her career. Playing a brilliant but emotionally scarred detective trapped in a case tied to her own haunting past, Olson delivers a raw, intense transformation that critics say feels like “True Detective meets Mare of Easttown.” 😱

f you ask Kaitlin Olson to tell you the best day of her life, she’ll immediately have an answer for you. While cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans last winter, the longtime It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia actress—and star of the ABC crime drama High Potential—finally heard something other than “Shut up, bird!” from her rabid fan base.

“High Potential had come out, and there were so many brand-new fans who just knew me as Morgan,” Olson tells me between filming episodes of season 2. “It was really fun.” Plus, “they had no idea who Rob was,” she jokes.

Olson and her Sunny costar, Rob Mac, began dating shortly after she joined the series and then married after filming season 4 in late 2008. The couple now have two children together. Meanwhile, the FX comedy hit its 20-year anniversary last month following 17 seasons on the air, becoming the longest-running live-action sitcom in TV history.

At the same time, Olson enters the second season of High Potential, on which she stars as police consultant Morgan Gillory. Though Olson’s character begins the series as a cleaning woman, she helps the homicide department solve a case by fixing their murder board in Good Will Hunting style and then transitions to something of a part-time detective. As it turns out, Gillory has an IQ of 160, which classifies her as a high-potential intellectual (HPI). She never forgets a fact and observes crime scenes like a hawk, but her fixation on the cases are often a gift and a curse. Backed by a strong performance, her unconventional methods proved to be a hit with audiences. Olson led the crime procedural to garner the largest audience for an ABC series in the past six years. So it seems that the best day of her life turned into quite the stellar year.

“I can’t believe how lucky I am right now,” Olson says. “I just don’t know if I’ve been very vocal about it. I have a lot of friends who aren’t working right now, especially in Los Angeles. There’s just not a lot of projects and certainly not a lot of shows filming here. So I recognize how fortunate I am because my kids live here, and I live here. And my life right now … I don’t ever take it for granted.”

Below, Olson shares how Deandra “Sweet Dee” Reynolds has evolved over 17 seasons of It’s Always Sunny, why she almost turned down High Potential, and why nothing makes people laugh more than good ol’ practical comedy.

 

Olson guest-stars as Deborah “DJ” Vance Jr., Deborah’s (Jean Smart) daughter, on HBO’s Hacks.

ESQUIRE: Congrats on 20 years of It’s Always Sunny. That’s such an accomplishment.

KAITLIN OLSON: It’s ridiculous. Every time I think about it, I’m like, “What?” It feels like both five years ago that we started and 200 years ago that we started. Our lives are completely different. I was a child. It’s very funny.

Do you feel that Dee has evolved as a character in any way since, or how you approach playing her?

Glad you asked. Dee has not evolved whatsoever. [Laughs.] She just got older. But that’s the whole point. These characters will just dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes, and they’ll never learn anything. They’ll never have a light-bulb moment or a moral epiphany. They’re just going to end up like Danny DeVito, all of ’em. Short and bald.

There is definitely a Seinfeld quality to them—where it feels like they’ll never change, and you can predict exactly how they would act in any scenario.

Which presents its own set of challenges. I feel so incredibly grateful that our writers are so smart and talented, because it’s exactly what you said. You could run the risk of being very predictable, because it’s going to be a disaster. So the creative ways in which they find for these characters to dig themselves new holes is just always so delightful to me.

 

Olson married her It’s Always Sunny costar Rob Mac. The couple now have two children together.

Has Dee’s style of loud, practical comedy always been your MO, or is that something you grew into as an actress?

I always found yelling at people very funny. I used to do it to my parents for fun, and they would die laughing. So it’s also very cathartic for me. I was just a very sweet, shy, quiet kid, and so yelling was not really in my nature. We weren’t a yelling family. For people to yell at each other—that in and of itself, it’s already so stupid.

But even outside of the voice, there’s a physicality to it as well—the way you can just throw your body around—that really separates Dee from the rest of the Sunny crew.

My role models were always women who were not afraid to look ridiculous. Things have changed a lot, and we have so many incredible female actors on TV doing insane things. But when I was little, women on TV were just pretty, cute, or on soap operas. Every once in a while, you’d get a Carol Burnett or a Gilda Radner. Later on, you’d get Julia Louis-Dreyfus, or Saturday Night Live characters, who were just not concerned about what they looked like. It was way more about giving 100 percent of yourself. I just always found the more insane, the better. The uglier, the better.

I’d much rather throw my body over a railing and flail. In fact, that’s why I didn’t want other people to do stunts for me for a really long time. I was like, “Eh, she’s just jumping over the thing.”

I’ve always enjoyed when you can tell that someone actually did it themselves.

Yeah, right? It’s impressive. I want to see all their limbs about to break themselves on something. I’ve always found that admirable.

 

Olson and her It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia costars celebrate their 20th anniversary on air this year.

I read that you almost turned down High Potential when you first got the offer.

Yeah, but it wasn’t like a formal turning down. It’s just my agent had to really make me sit down and read it. I had Sunny. I was enjoying working part of the year and then being a mom the other part of the year. Jumping in on things that were fun [like Hacks] but then having the time to develop my next show. So in my head, that was going to be a much different character from Dee, and I wanted to do a comedy/drama hybrid.

I always figured it would be on streaming and it would be ten episodes or something like that. I could still have Sunny and a life and all that stuff. So the idea of being on an hour-long drama on network television just wasn’t appealing. It took my agent saying, “Okay, I understand that, but I’m not going to give up until you read it.” And he was right. I fell in love with the character.

What do you make of High Potential’s success so far?

A lot of people can relate to Morgan. It’s nice to see a person who might seem very put together but be a bit of a mess. Someone who is a really good mom but a fuck up in real life. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. She doesn’t flaunt the fact that she’s smart. It’s disarming. She’s just doing whatever she can to make it work and make sure her kids are good. Once you have kids, nothing else really matters. If they’re happy, you’re happy. That might have something to do with it.

There’s a strong representation of fatherhood on season 1 as well, even though you and Taran Killam’s characters are separated.

Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, because we talked about that with Drew Goddard, who created this show. He really wanted that to be a big part of the show—that this [relationship] didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like each other. You don’t see it on TV that often, but I know a handful of couples who are so much better off now that they’re just very good friends. It’s a good representation.

 

Olson stars as Morgan Gillory in High Potential. She’s an intellectually gifted cleaning woman who takes on a job as a police consultant after helping to solve a case.

This show has so many long, complicated lines. I’m just watching every episode thinking, How the hell did she memorize all of that? Is there a trick?

She also wonders how the hell she memorized that. And it’s immediately gone from my memory about 20 minutes after we’re done with the scene. There’s just no room in there. But I feel like I’m probably never going to develop dementia. You know how people do crossword puzzles to keep their brains active? There’s no risk of Alzheimer’s for me.

That being said, the pilot episode with all of the numbers—with the groceries that I was adding up—fully cheated. There are just tiny Post-it notes with numbers everywhere. If you look closely, my eyes are looking at the ham to figure out what the next number is going to be. And I don’t regret it for a second. No goddamn way I would’ve been able to memorize all those numbers. You can’t improvise your way through math.

Have you ever taken any of the facts home to your kids and said, “Guess what I learned today?”

A couple things have popped up where I’m like, “Oh, that’s a ‘patrocotoxin.’ Somebody will be talking about something, and I’m like, “Oh, I learned that on the TV show!”

Give it a couple more seasons, maybe you’ll be able to rattle off facts like her.

And I’m never going to give credit to the show. I’m just going to pretend I knew that.

Are your kids old enough to enjoy It’s Always Sunny now?

My oldest son is absolutely obsessed. Any free time he gets, if he’s allowed to, he is watching it. This is the same kid who when he was like eight or nine was sneaking scripts and reading them in his bed at night when he was supposed to be sleeping. Now I have a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old. They watch all of them. And I’m so irritating. I’m constantly in the background going, “Oh, okay, well, that’s funny right here, but you couldn’t say that at school.” And he’s like, “I know, Mom. I get it.” So I have no more controls. It’s off the rails.