11/14/2025
"if they shut a door, I climbed through a window."
I don’t know if all of this is true about Danny DeVito, but if it is, it definitely shows a defiance and resilience that we could all learn a little from!
Break the molds, rewrite your own narrative. Whether in your career path or your health goals. 
He wasn’t born to fit the frame. He wasn’t the shape Hollywood wanted. But Danny DeVito walked into every room as if he owned all the air in it.
Los Angeles, 1975. A casting room packed with tall, polished actors. Scripts in hand. Perfect posture. Quiet confidence. Then the door flew open.
Danny DeVito marched in wearing a scuffed leather jacket, hair sticking out in all directions, eyes burning with the kind of confidence that doesn’t ask for permission. The room froze.
He scanned the six-foot actors and said:
“Alright… so which one of you is playing the tall guy?”
The room burst into laughter.
They wouldn’t be laughing long.
DeVito wasn’t the obvious choice for Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The producers needed someone loud, unpredictable, overflowing with energy. They expected height to deliver that power.
Then DeVito sat down, leaned forward, and stared at Milos Forman like he already belonged in the film.
Forman asked why the role mattered to him.
DeVito tapped the script gently and said:
“Because he thinks quicker than the others.
He just doesn’t have the room to show it.”
It was quiet. Everyone felt it.
And for $350 a week, he took the role that the tall men had come for.
On set, something magical happened. While other actors shouted and moved big, DeVito stole scenes by barely moving. A raised eyebrow. A twitch. A half-smile. The camera began drifting toward him—again and again—not because he demanded attention, but because he earned it.
One day during filming, he slid a chair closer to Jack Nicholson—just a few inches. No warning. Nicholson broke character laughing, completely disarmed. Forman kept the moment. DeVito had done the thing only great actors can do:
He made the room respond to him.
After Cuckoo’s Nest, people said he would vanish. One small role. One strange character. Nothing lasting.
Then came Taxi.
The ABC executives looked at his picture and flat-out said America wouldn’t accept a five-foot dispatcher as a main character. Too short. Too odd. Too risky.
DeVito didn’t shrink back. He walked into the table read, dropped the script dramatically on the table, and growled:
“Who wrote this idiot dispatcher? I love him.”
The room exploded in laughter.
A few minutes later, he left with a contract worth $15,000 an episode. By season two, he walked onstage to accept a Golden Globe.
The man they said was “too small for television” was now the biggest presence on it.
But his greatest transformation came in 1989.
Batman. The Penguin.
Warner Bros wanted a traditional villain—someone tall, polished, “marketable.” Tim Burton pushed back.
He slid a sketch of the Penguin toward DeVito. A lonely face. A long beak-like nose. A man shaped by cruelty.
DeVito studied it, touched the drawing, and said quietly:
“He’s angry because the world never let him be normal.”
Burton didn’t even blink.
“You understand him,” he said.
“And that’s why you’re him.”
What followed was brutal.
Three hours of makeup every morning.
Cold sewer sets. Stiff costumes. Heavy prosthetics.
No body double. No shortcuts.
He wanted the pain, because the Penguin lived in pain.
The movie made more than $260 million.
But money wasn’t the point.
The point was that Danny DeVito—the man who was never the right height, never the right shape, never the “ideal actor”—had become unforgettable.
He once summed up his entire life in one sentence:
“If they shut a door, I climb through the window.”
And that was the truth of him.
He climbed through every window Hollywood tried to close. He turned disadvantages into weapons.
He turned doubt into fuel. He turned a five-foot frame into a giant shadow. Danny DeVito didn’t rise because the industry welcomed him.
He rose because he refused to sit down.
