Despite his penchant for playing the occasional deviant, it’s tough not to love Danny DeVito. His portrayal of memorable characters, from Louie de Palma in “Taxi” to Owen in “Throw Mamma from the Train”, to Frank Reynolds on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and scores of others, transcends generations. DeVito’s witty, affable onscreen deceptions continue to re-emerge in a variety of roles. What’s even more alluring, in real life, the guy loves a good cigar.
DeVito says his father smoked De Nobili, an inexpensive, Italian-style, machine-made cigar that young Danny found “a little rough” for his adolescent taste. In his early days as an Off-Off-Broadway actor in New York, he occasionally bought some De Nobilis himself, but he says cigars were “mostly on the back burner” with him for a long time. He came to appreciate them only gradually.
t wasn’t until meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger that DeVito began to smoke cigars regularly. While filming Twins in 1987, Schwarzenegger gave him a box of cigars. “I was on a major diet then”, DeVito recalls, “so Arnold being Arnold, he also gave me a dozen pastries.”
DeVito didn’t eat all the pastries. But he did smoke all the cigars, and sometime after that, he began making them part of his routine. At first just on weekends and now, every day. According to his November/December 2018 Cigar Aficionado interview, his favorites are all Cubans. He began with COHIBA Siglio VI, switched to Partagas Serie D No. 4 after a few years and recently switched again, to Diplomático No. 2. “Now I’m starting to have a big leaning toward Bolívar Cofradias,” DeVito says. “It depends on my mood and where I am and what I’m doing. When I’m not working on a movie, I like to get up in the morning and take the kids to school, come home and read and work out and have a good lunch and come outside and fire up. A Bolivar seems nice then.”