As online commenters blame Rob Mac’s new name on Ryan Reynolds or sentient dentistry — “His veneers are taking over his body like the symbiote,” wrote one fan on Twitter — the actor formerly known as Rob McElhenney is setting the record straight on the switch.
On Tuesday evening, the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star headed to social media with a clip spending “exactly one minute” discussing his admittedly “kinda douchey” decision to legally change his name to “Rob Mac” decades into his career, a choice he insisted stemmed from practicality rather than pure Hollywood vanity. “The amount of time that I have wasted trying to get people to either say or spell my name correctly is literally days of my life,” he explained. “Trust me, I added it up.”
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But as the Mac actor (and now real-life guy) can attest, this waste of time isn’t a one-way street. “More importantly, it means thousands of you have had minutes of your lives stolen by me because of my last name, including this one,” he argued.
Unsurprisingly, the time-saving wonders of shaving three syllables off his name weren’t enough to sell several fans, who had a whole lot to say even after this clarification. “Your name looks small,” one Instagram user commented on the clip, while another questioned why all of his socials still sported his full 10-letter surname.
“Make it Ronald McDonald!!!” joked a third fan, referencing Mac’s Always Sunny character’s fast-food-inspired full name.
But unlike his legion of eye-rolling fans, Mac insisted he’d already gotten the stamp of approval from his Irish family, who had changed the spelling of their last name multiple times for multiple reasons (including immigration) throughout multiple generations.
“Times have changed, and most people already call me Rob Mac anyway,” he maintained. “My family knows me and loves me regardless of how many syllables I have and that’s the only thing I really care about.”
That said, even he knows this whole thing is kinda dumb. “There are so many things going on in the world, and this is a silly one to continue to waste your time with,” he said.
But although the McElhenney surname may be dead and buried, at least we’ll always have this banger:
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