Lucy DeVito Is the Devil's Advocate

The actress voices the title character on the FXX animated series Little Demon, where she also serves as an executive producer.

Mara Reinstein

For a hot minute, Lucy DeVito considered changing her last name. “I thought that maybe if I could be more anonymous, my career would be different,” she says. Then she had a change of heart: “I have a lot of pride in my name, so why should I hide from that?”

Her moniker is all over the animated series Little Demon, premiering August 25 on FXX (and streaming the next day on Hulu), both as the voice of the title character and as an executive producer. And given her comedic lineage — dad Danny DeVito and mom Rhea Perlman collected five Emmy Awards in total for portraying saltier-than-pretzels characters on Taxi and Cheers, respectively — it’s no surprise that the series is a subversive delight.

This is a story, after all, about thirteen-year-old Chrissy Feinberg, who learns that her estranged deadbeat dad is the devil and she’s the antichrist. Aubrey Plaza voices her mom; her dad is played by — well, take one guess.

“I think he’s perfectly cast!” she jokes. “He’s the sweetest dad, but he has this very sick and twisted mind. We call him the Prince of Darkness.” (Her father and her brother, Jake, are executive producers as well; her sister Grace is a fine artist.)

Though she was raised in L.A., DeVito notes that she inherited her parents’ “East Coast vibe.” Family TV nights usually consisted of Seinfeld and I Love Lucy and Marx Brothers reruns. She liked acting in high school because she could come out of her shell, but “my parents didn’t want me involved in anything professionally until I went to college.” She got her degree in theater at Brown University and has appeared in Melissa & Joey as well as several stage productions.

DeVito was inspired to help develop Little Demon after her longtime friend, Darcy Fowler (a cocreator of the series), brought her a one-page pitch.

“My dad and I had wanted to work on something together, and we liked the idea of tapping into this absurdist horror comedy,” she explains. Indeed, while she plans to continue acting, she learned from her dad that the devil is in the behind-the-scenes details.

“He always told me that when I’m on a set, I should look at everything and talk to everyone,” she says. “He’s one of the best role models anyone could ever hope for.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #9, 2022, under the title, "Devil's Advocate."