Glenn Howerton is well aware that he has a “proclivity” for playing “petulant, entitled people,” but his take on Fred didn’t come from any of his previous onscreen personas. Instead, he realized that he had been pretending to be someone just like Fred for a while when joking around with his famous, funny friends:
“I have this group of friends that are all really funny. They’re actually all actor friends, and you know how you and your friends are always doing bits? Well, me and my friends are always doing bits, and one bit that was like a very frequent bit amongst this group of friends was the extremely petulant, entitled, kid who’s like, ‘Mom! Would you just give me exactly what I want?!’ Yeah, and so we would always do this, and we’re always kind of messing around with his character. So, as soon as I read the script, and I read Fred, I was like, oh, he is that guy. That’s the guy! Okay, so it was kind of a version of something, kind of a bit that me and my buddies have been doing for years.”
It’s not difficult to imagine Howerton and some of his funny friends joking about a spoiled child character who demands that people give him what he wants, when he wants it, but now I want to know who helped him come up with this bit. Was the gang of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” throwing this one around on set or before hitting “record” on their podcast? Did he and Patton Oswalt come up with it on “A.P. Bio”? Wherever this character was born, it would have been fun to be around to witness it.