NEW YORK, Feb. 11 (UPI) — Taxi, Hercules and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia icon Danny DeVito said he and his former Twins co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger are actively looking for something else to collaborate on after reuniting for a State Farm Insurance Super Bowl commercial Sunday.
“We’re working on a project now,” DeVito, 79, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“We were set to do a Twins sequel, but Ivan Reitman, who was our director, passed away, unfortunately. We miss him. We are back in the works, developing a project for Arnold and I to star in, so that we can get on the big screen together. I am very excited about it.”
Until then, they will make people laugh with their new commercial.
“Arnold and I have been trying to get together again since the early days, before his job as the governor, all that stogie-smoking in Sacramento, got in the way,” DeVito said.
“I was really thrilled when I heard he was doing this for State Farm. I like the company and I like his company most of all. We get along. We have good chemistry. This came along and I got to spend the day with him and it was really wonderful.”
DeVito, who had planned to watch the Super Bowl at home in his pajamas, is looking forward to people’s reactions when they see the ad.
He thinks Twins fans will be especially pleased.
The ad shows Schwarzenegger wearing a red State Farm polo shirt, while rescuing a pregnant woman, saving puppies from a fire, paragliding and flying a helicopter.
He is every bit the action hero, but when he tries to say the company’s tagline, however, the Austrian actor’s accent keeps mangling the word “neighbor,” with it repeatedly coming out, “Like a good ‘neighbah,’ State Farm is there,” prompting the commercial’s director to repeatedly correct Schwarzenegger’s pronunciation.
In the end, the commercial is played on a movie theater screen and, just as Schwarzenegger is about to say the line, DeVito completes for him, perfectly emphasizing the “or” in “neighbor.”
The camera then pans to the two actors in the theater audience where Schwarzenegger tells DeVito he is a “backstabbah.”
“I am a ‘backstabber,'” DeVito emphasized.
Schwarzenegger first hinted that the duo were cooking up something when he posted a photo on Instagram in December of him visiting DeVito and his daughter Lucy backstage at their Broadway play, I Need That, at the Roundabout Theater Company where he previously co-starred with Mark Ruffalo and Tony Shalhoub in 2017’s The Price.
“That was big,” DeVito said, recalling how moved he was by Schwarzenegger’s show of support in this most recent production.
“He is such a good friend,” he added. “He jumped on a plane and he came to see me. It was so great. It was so touching. It was wonderful to have him in the audience and I think we really nailed it that night, as well. … I know he was very affected by it. Our social situations are usually when we are having fun, eating dinner, lunch or smoking a stogie, but this was a whole other experience.”
DeVito will soon take the stage at State Theatre in his native New Jersey to host a screening of the 1996 family movie, Matilda, which he directed and co-starred in with his wife Rhea Perlman and Mara Wilson as the title character.
The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will play the film’s score at the event, while Perlman and Wilson are also expected to attend.
“It’s so much fun to be on stage with a live audience. They feed you,” said DeVito, who also recently lent his distinctive voice to a character in the animated movie, Migration, and played a historian in the live-action adventure, Haunted Mansion.
“It’s a refreshing to do. You do the movies. You do television and then to get in front of a live audience again, there’s no comparison.”
In addition to keeping busy professionally, the actor’s family life is also a source of great joy for him.
“I just became a grandpa,” he said.
“I’ve got an 11-month-old granddaughter. She’s a gorgeous kid,” he added, noting he can’t wait to show her all of the animated classics he has worked on over the years. “We’ll start with My Little Pony, then we’ll go to Hercules and Lorax and Migration was out this year. I play Uncle Dan. I love working with Illumination. Those people are really fun and she’ll see some little duckies.”
