'Perfect Couples' actress Mary Elizabeth Ellis

You've known her for years at the only mentally healthy character on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Well, it looks like Mary Elizabeth Ellis is sick of missing out on all the fun, because in her new show—NBC's midseason replacement series Perfect Couples—she's the batshit one for a change! Here I talk to her about Sunny, Couples, and angry singing.

Your role on Perfect Couples seems very different from the role you’ve been playing recently on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
That’s right. It’s a lot of fun for me because on It’s Always Sunny I’m kind of the normal eyes. I’m kind of the eyes of the audience looking around and going “Oh my god, these people are crazy.” And on Perfect Couples I kind of get to be the person about whom others say “Oh my god, this person’s crazy,” so it’s a lot of fun for me to have a role that I get to do a little bit more with.

It’s Always Sunny is definitely one of the zanier shows on television right now, whereas Perfect Couples seems a little more… normal, I guess.
Yeah. The creators of Perfect Couples are Scott Silveri, who wrote for Friends, and Jon Pollack, who wrote for 30 Rock, so I think they kind of took their sensibilities from having written those two very amazing, very different shows and put them together. They just wanted to make a low-concept, high-class comedy about relationships that would fit in the NBC lineup, which is full of really funny comedies but mostly ones set in the workplace right now.

What do you think this show will bring to network programming?
Well, it’s a relationship comedy, so even though situations are often heightened on television—because otherwise you would just live your own life and not watch other people do theirs—the relationships, even though they’re heightened, are true ones that people should be able to relate to; these characters are people that you know, and if you don’t know them then you are them, so watch out for that.

[laughs]
But they’re all heightened versions of different parts of ourselves as a whole.

Tell me a little about your character.
My character’s name is Amy; she’s from Louisiana, and she is half of the Vance-and-Amy couple. We’re the only couple that’s not married on the show. We get engaged in the pilot, the first episode, and we spend the season planning our wedding and breaking up and getting back together. We’re very passionate, volatile… we love at 110% and we fight at 110%. It’s a really awesome character to get to play. You’ll see in the first episode that we have a “game night” with all of the other couples, and Vance has to trick Amy into going to it because she hates pressure, and when he tells her that he hates her singing voice she just explodes into a fun buildup of every kind of emotion you can fit into 30 seconds.

So the couple of Vance and Amy allows the show to explore different dynamics than the other couples.
They’re kind of pitching Vance and Amy as the crazy couple—the crazy passionate couple. Dave and Julia are the, uh, “normal” couple, and Rex and Leigh are the couple that thinks they’re perfect and have everything figured out. Anyway, that’s how it starts out, and then as the season goes on people start trying on different roles, and we mix and match different character. You know, it’ll be all the girls together, then all the guys together. It’s a lot of fun to get to do that.

How did you get involved with the show? Did the producers know about you from It’s Always Sunny?
Yeah, they knew my work from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and—you know how there’s this thing here called pilot season, which is where all these new shows are being created? As an actor, just going and auditioning for all these different shows, I went in and read the script and thought it was really funny and was excited to get to play this really neurotic character. So I went in and did the audition, which involved singing Dreamgirls angrily at the top of my lungs, and I guess it rang true for them when I did it. I guess I’m a really good angry singer!

Perfect Couples airs Thursdays at 8:30pm.