Prior to filming what would become the “Always Sunny” pilot, the gang filmed a mockumentary about, according to Howerton, “a grown-up Haley Joel Osment living with grown-up Frankie Muniz.” The general idea was that the two of them were broke and trying to get back into acting, and Howerton played their acting teacher. Ellis played a waitress at the Olive Garden in Burbank who was having a “backdoor relationship” with Osment, but that was probably because she was actually a waitress at an Olive Garden in real life at the time. Ganz teased the guys about constantly making the women in their creations waitresses, but Day and McElhenney had pretty good explanations as to why. Day explained that at that stage in their lives, they didn’t know very many women who weren’t waitresses, and McElhenney pointed out that they were pretty much all waiters and waitresses at that point anyway. Starving actors do often wait tables to survive, so that makes a lot of sense.
That means that Ellis went from being an Olive Garden waitress to playing an Olive Garden waitress to playing a coffee shop waitress whose name is never revealed. Poor Ellis will never escape being a waitress, it seems, even if her days of waiting tables are long behind her.