Charlie Day was driving around Los Angeles one day, listening to mariachi music by the Los Tres Ases, when it struck him that films like his beloved Being There or The Jerk just aren’t being made anymore. “I was just thinking about the type of movies that I loved and that I wish I could be in,” he says. “I thought, It’d be nice to just make something for myself to get a chance to do a performance like that.”
At the time, back in 2014, Day was pretty busy with Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the comedy series he cocreated and continues to write and star in. But between seasons, he began tinkering with a script for a movie, which was at the time called El Tonto. He wasn’t sure it would ever be made, but almost a decade later and through a roller coaster of a process, Day’s directorial debut—now called Fool’s Paradise and distributed by Roadside Attractions—is finally making its way to theaters on May 12.
As seen in Vanity Fair’s first-look photos, the satire is set in a world familiar to Day—Hollywood. It follows a struggling publicist (Ken Jeong) who stumbles upon a man recently released from a mental health facility (Day) who looks just like a Method actor who refuses to leave his trailer. As his star begins to rise, he’s surrounded by a gang of colorful characters, including eccentric costars, a pushy producer, a demanding director, and a fallen action hero. With a star-studded cast that includes Kate Beckinsale, Adrien Brody, Common, Jason Sudeikis, Edie Falco, John Malkovich, and Ray Liotta in one of his final roles, the film pushed Day beyond what he could have ever imagined, not only because it required him to star as a silent character, but because he took a risk with eleventh-hour reshoots to ensure that he was telling the story exactly as he wanted.
“There were times over the course of this movie when I thought, Why am I doing this? I should just show up and act and stand on my mark and say my lines,” says Day. “But something always draws me back to just wanting to put a story together.”
Fool’s Paradise may be his feature directorial debut, but Day has been making movies since his early days in New York, when his roommate Jimmi Simpson used the earnings from his first big paid gig—Amy Heckerling’s film Loser—to buy a digital camera. He never really stopped telling stories, eventually moving to Los Angeles where he teamed up with his friends to create It’s Always Sunny. “I think I felt extremely confident in approaching this experience of directing this film because of my years of experience on Sunny,” he says. “And I still think I made every mistake in the book, but I was able to clean up as much of it as I could with the reshoot.”
Day originally shot the film in 2018, but when he showed an early cut to his friend Guillermo del Toro (Day had a role in his 2013 film Pacific Rim), the director’s notes inspired Day to add 27 pages to the script. “I just knew in my gut something was missing,” says Day, who fleshed out Jeong’s character to become the emotional center of the movie.
Still, he didn’t think the film’s financier would ever let him reshoot such a significant part of the film. But del Toro gave him the push he needed. “He gave me the great advice that you only get one chance at your first movie, and if you know there’s a better version of it and a way to achieve it, you’ll regret forever not trying to make that change,” says Day.
Jeong, several other members of the cast, and the crew returned for the reshoots in late 2021. “By the time that I was doing these changes, I had grown so much as a filmmaker just from learning from what I felt were mistakes in the first pass,” says Day. “It was really just taking the risk to follow whatever your sense of artistic integrity is, and just trusting it and just chasing it down at all costs to make something that works.”
