“I grew up watching immense amounts of it,” he explains, “so I’m a student of the form.” He started out as an actor in New York, but when he struggled to find parts his agent suggested he write. What he did have was an obsessive love of television. “It is astonishing to them, having known me for ever, that I’m in this position. “I’m in a text chain with my friends from high school and I’m not even the third funniest person,” he says. He credits his Jesuit education for helping him productively channel his teenage aggression, but says he was never class clown. The world was my oyster, and I felt that way even though I grew up poor and didn’t know anybody in Hollywood.”īorn in Philadelphia in 1977, McElhenney was a scrawny child who at 13 weighed just 87lb. Always Sunny, he points out, would never have existed had he not moved to Los Angeles “fuelled by privilege, true privilege, and the ignorance and testosterone of a 25-year-old white dude. McElhenney is self-aware enough to see some of these traits in himself. Because of the human ego’s desire for glorification, people step into the spotlight and say: ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ I don’t have to draw parallels to the situation we have in this country now, but it’s fairly obvious there’s a cult of personality that Americans specifically are driven to adore.” “As humans we like this idea that there’s one person solely responsible for everything.
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With Mythic Quest, he wanted to explore the tension between the game developer as the driving force behind a game, and the reality that, like making a TV show, building a game is an intensely collaborative process.
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He’s a ridiculous version of an actual human being.” “First, that they would own up to that, and second, because he has a very specific look, and the guys all look very, very similar.
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“I thought that was really funny,” he grins. Since the show first aired, McElhenney has been contacted on social media by a number of game developers who all assumed that they alone were the inspiration for the preening buffoon. At their offices in Montreal he met a game designer who, when McElhenney asked what he did, replied after an uncomfortably long pause: “I build worlds.”
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The seed of the show was planted when Ubisoft, the gaming giant that develops Assassin’s Creed, approached McElhenney about making a TV show. McElhenney plays an egomaniacal, bushy-bearded game creator named Ian (pronounced Iron) Grimm who constantly butts heads with long-suffering lead engineer Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao). Questions about the role traditional masculinity plays in the workplace are at the heart of Mythic Quest, which centres on the team behind a massively popular online fantasy game. ‘My character is a ridiculous version of an actual human being’ … Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.