Rob McElhenney is making it legal: The “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Welcome to Wrexham” star has legally filed in Los Angeles to change his name to “Rob Mac.” Mac confirmed the news to Variety on Friday; it was first reported by TMZ.
Variety readers won’t be surprised by the news; Mac first revealed the plan in a cover story last month.
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At the time, Mac told us he might be changing his name to that easier pronunciation. “People already call me ‘Rob Mac’ or ‘Mac,’ obviously from the TV show. It just makes things so much easier,” he said.
Eagle-eyed reporters may have noticed that all of FX’s recent press releases for both “Sunny” and “Wrexham” have already started crediting him as “Rob Mac,” so it was all leading up to this.
“McElhenney” has never been easy for people to say, so much so that Mac’s “Wrexham” partner Ryan Reynolds created an entire music video last year for Mac’s birthday as a pronunciation primer. (It really is quite simple: Say it as “Mackle-Henney.”)
But as Mac’s new company More Better Industries has upped its global investments, including a pair of soccer teams in Colombia and Mexico, in addition to stakes in apparel, tech and alcohol companies, he found that his last name was a constant source of confusion.
That’s why, “as our business and our storytelling is expanding into other regions of the world and other languages in which my name is even harder to pronounce, I’m just going by Rob Mac,” he said.
“As I get older, and people are more prone to calling me ‘Mr.’ or’ Sir,’ I just say Rob or Rob Mac. And I find that that makes things a lot simpler and easier. People already call me Rob Mac or Mac, obviously, from the television show and it just makes things so much easier.”
Before committing to the change, Mac was worried that he might be disrespecting his ancestry. “I did a deep dive into my my ancestry, and so I was always very proud of the name, which is why I didn’t change it in the beginning, when everybody was begging me to,” he said. “When you’re first starting out, they’re like, ‘let’s just have a stage name.’”
But he recently discovered even some relatives had tweaked “McElhenney” over the years. “It turns out, as I did my genealogy and I got it back, my last name has been changed so many times. As late as the ’60s, there were an offshoot of the McElhenneys that changed our name. And so it’s not like everybody was so precious about it prior to 1965.”
And when family members dropped by to celebrate his birthday earlier this year, they admitted that they were eager to change the name as well.
“My brother said, ‘I was actually considering running for government in Culver City, and I was going to be ‘Pat Mac,’” he said. Mac’s sister Katie, who has written on “Sunny” and “Mythic Quest” (Mac’s fantastic Apple TV+ show that was recently canceled after four seasons), also revealed that “’literally every person in the world calls me Katie Mac.’”
It had become quite the hot topic at home, where Mac’s wife, “Sunny” and “High Potential” star Kaitlin Olson, admitted that their young teens are kind of embarrassed by the idea and not quite on board just yet. “The kids are really not happy about it, because they have that last name,” she said this spring. “And so do I, legally!”
Mac’s “Sunny” co-star Glenn Howerton hadn’t heard about all of this when Variety talked to him in May, but said at the time it reminded him of how Mac broke the news that he had the audacious idea of buying a soccer team in the UK. “You could be telling me something that he’s joking about, or you could be telling me something where he could be in downtown L.A. changing his name right now for all I know,” he said.
And now, that’s exactly what he’s doing.
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The post Rob McElhenney Files to Legally Change His Name to ‘Rob Mac’ appeared first on Variety.
