Mary Elizabeth Ellis might not have a name on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but she might have the most calibrated moral compass on the show, so it's not a bad tradeoff—and from the mean streets to the sneakily clever suburban family sitcom The Grinder, Ellis delivers grounded humor. Her signature dry edge is the perfect counterbalance for a crowd of goofball antics that could derail a show.

Here, Ellis talks to GQ about paying dues, a creative marriage (with It's Always Sunny's Charlie Day), and laughing in church.

Something I admire in The Grinder's central relationship (between Ellis and Fred Savage) was that you two actually make each other laugh. Why do you think it's so rare to see in sitcom marriages, which are ostensibly filled with jokes?

When you’re in a relationship, hopefully you’re with someone who makes you laugh, otherwise it’s going to be a really, really long lifetime of banal sadness. It’s okay to laugh at each other; it feels good, it feels more real.

We definitely are trying to be a little jokey. We wanted the relationship to mirror the relationships that we have with our spouses, because we both have relationships where we really enjoy the other person. We also wanted to make sure both characters work, both characters raise the kids. That’s what’s real in most of the relationships around us right now.

Do you and your husband try to keep work and life separate to some extent?

We definitely talk about work a lot at home. It’s a really beautiful and exciting part about our relationship; I can’t imagine as an actor or an artist not having someone that I couldn’t talk to about process. It’s really an enrichment for me. It’s nice, but it’s not like we’re in our twenties anymore, where we could be like, Let’s lay around and read poetry and read a play with each other and draw about it. No, no that’s not happening. It's like, the kid goes to bed, and who’s cleaning up the poop, and what are we making for lunch tomorrow? But it’s nice to have had that—one day, we’ll get back to that. Just laying around, reading poetry.

Have you felt like you've needed to keep It's Always Sunny away from your elder family?

I still read scripts and I’m like, Oh my god are you really going to say this? Sometimes it still makes me cringe. My dad gets upset about the swearing. I'm from a really small town in Mississippi. I go home, I go to the church I grew up in. I bring Charlie with me and people are freaking out because they loved Horrible Bosses so much. I’m like, I feel like we shouldn’t even talk about Horrible Bosses in church! We’re all going to go to hell. It’s Always Sunny even more so, because my husband writes that. But I think there’s something to be said for success and coming from a place where not a lot of people become quote unquote famous. There’s something that just excites people about people that create art or shows that last so long. I think a lot is forgiven because of that.

Is there a time when something in the show was too much for you?

When they had Charlie's uncle, who they have kind of established as a pedophile, goes on the news and he had a picture of a kid. The photo was of one of the writer's assistants as a child. I was like: I’m done, that’s it! That’s just gone too far. And Charlie was like, Oh, that’s where the line is? But once you have your kid, that stuff just made me edgy.