I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one. –Ignatius J. Reilly
I am the man who has the ball, I am the man who can throw it faster than fuck. So that is why I am better than everyone in the world. –Kenny Powers
Danny McBride’s characters are, with a few exceptions, magnetically terrible. Over the past 20 years, he’s written himself a collection of profane, overconfident, wrongheaded, tacky Southern men whose delusions and ineptitude keep them from becoming the heroes they see themselves as in their own minds. The approach has allowed him and his tight-knit pack of collaborators to study—and make fun of—a very specific type of 21st-century American unexceptionalism.
For the uninitiated, this unique blend of dumbassery can cause, well, reflexive disgust. When Kimberly Gregory was cast opposite McBride and Walton Goggins in Vice Principals, she was taken aback. She’s a Black woman, and an early script called for the HBO show’s two white leads to burn her house down. McBride was aware of how that looked. “I want you to know that your character really should be the protagonist. She’s the good person,” Gregory recalls him saying. “We’re not, and we’re going to win, and that’s what this story is.”
From that moment on, Gregory understood McBride’s sense of humor. She knew that he knew the truth about his guys: They deserved to be laughed at, not laughed with. He’s always trusted his audience to make the same realization. “I feel like there’s a knee-jerk reaction to what we do,” McBride says. “And then once people take the ride, they understand a little bit more of what we’re trying to do and what to expect from it.”
Tae kwon do instructor Fred Simmons in The Foot Fist Way, washed-up major leaguer Kenny Powers in Eastbound & Down, doofus drug dealer Red in Pineapple Express, authoritarian educator Neal Gamby in Vice Principals, and rich failson pastor Jesse in The Righteous Gemstones are all pathetically self-important. But even when they’re at their worst, McBride manages to make them at least semi-sympathetic. “I don’t think anyone can play characters that make so many mistakes that you want to kick but also hug at the same time better than Danny McBride,” says filmmaker Stephanie Laing, who worked on Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals.
It’s a trick that seems to come naturally to comedy’s preeminent cinephile, horror buff, martial artist, and discount fashion enthusiast. And with The Righteous Gemstones coming to an end on Sunday after four seasons, it’s the perfect time to learn how the hell he does it. “Danny’s a very smart man who plays not so smart characters really, really well, and so it lulls you into this false sense of camaraderie,” Gregory says. “Like, ‘I know this dude. I get him. That’s my neighbor, that’s my uncle, that’s my friend down the street—or my not friend down the street.’ It masquerades in a really wonderful way because he’s that good.”
Underneath the laughs, the Danny McBride oeuvre can be read as one collective cautionary tale: If you start to identify with his characters too much, you’re probably the butt of the joke.
Part 1: Off-Putting on Purpose
On-screen, McBride always seems to be gleefully running back and forth between highbrow and lowbrow. One scene might reference a François Truffaut film. Another might feature Kenny Powers smelling his baby son’s diaper, holding him up, and asking him this: “What did you eat, diarrhea?” Being part of that wacked-out world is, not surprisingly, a hell of a lot of fun.
Katy Mixon Greer (April Buchanon, Eastbound & Down): I mean, Danny, he’s just a force of nature.
Craig Robinson (Reg Mackworthy, Eastbound & Down): He has this playful confidence. He’s a little bit ahead. You know how when people are teasing you, but they seeing if you get the joke?
Walton Goggins (Lee Russell, Vice Principals; “Baby Billy” Freeman, The Righteous Gemstones): He is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. One of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And he infuses all of it with his humor, which ultimately has made him literally the funniest person I’ve ever met.
Gregory (Belinda Brown, Vice Principals): It’s raw, this man’s sense of humor. But it comes from a real honest place, so it works.
Tim Baltz (BJ Barnes, The Righteous Gemstones): There’s something about him that stays very pure about “I need to gut-laugh about this,” and that’s where the good stuff is. Put that out front and figure out the other stuff later.
David Gordon Green (consulting producer and director, Eastbound & Down; executive producer and director, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones): Think about when Fargo came out. And you’re in the audience trying to awkwardly figure out if you’re supposed to be laughing at the stuff you’re laughing at. When Steve Buscemi gets shot and it’s disgusting, or when they’re putting a leg in the wood chipper. They’re shocking moments, and they’re not necessarily funny. They just make you feel insane. That’s a great part of what Danny knows how to do. He knows how to push buttons.
Jody Hill (cocreator and director, Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals; executive producer and director, The Righteous Gemstones): Danny has this God-given ability to make you laugh when he does these fucked-up things. I don’t think everybody can do that.
McBride (cocreator, director, and star, Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones): Sometimes we embrace things that are off-putting on purpose.
Adam Devine (Kelvin Gemstone, The Righteous Gemstones): We come from the same school of thinking. I think that the funniest thing that you can do or say is the most inappropriate thing in the moment. This thing that’ll just put everyone on their heels. And Danny’s the king of that. He loves the most inappropriate thing. The amount of times he’ll just flip you off. … That’s his style, and I love it.
Goggins: He’s recommended a lot of things to me, a lot of books. And I don’t even ask him what it’s about. He’s always reading two or three books at a time. He just gives these jewels out all the time. The last one was Lincoln in the Bardo. I started Lincoln in the Bardo and was just so deeply emotionally impacted. Is there humor there? Absolutely. But it’s the underlying message of “Maybe this is what happens in the afterlife.”
“I think the pleasure that I take from it is just this idea of we’ve created this world, these characters, and then we get to show up at work and fuck with each other. It’s the best.”Danny McBride
Steve Little (Stevie Janowski, Eastbound & Down; Jacob Jones, The Righteous Gemstones): A person I know was saying how cinematic [Eastbound] is, the show itself, and how you wouldn’t expect that from a comedy. But I remember one scene was about fashion, and then McBride goes on about Rack Room Shoes. Just a monologue about discount fashion. And so you talk about Truffaut, and maybe I could see that, but I didn’t know he could do a monologue on discount fashion bargains.
Gregory: He did talk about Nordstrom Rack. I was really like, “Well, what does he know about the economic differences between Ross, Nordstrom Rack, and Bloomingdale’s?”
Green: He’s very dialed into what’s going on in the world and culture. And I say this not jokingly: He’s got a significant diet of reality television. Far more than me, he knows the lingo and behavior of what’s happening in technology. He keeps up to date on that, and I’m still stuck in the mid-’90s.
McBride: I think that our sensibilities are very specific.
Edi Patterson (Jen Abbott, Vice Principals; Judy Gemstone, The Righteous Gemstones): I like what my brain does when it’s looking at his brain. I feel like cool things happen.
Little: We were filming in Puerto Rico. It was so hot. We’re doing the scene, and Deep Roy’s mustache is starting to come off. And McBride was just laughing. He could have made the choice to be stressed and say, “Oh, this is not what HBO has ordered. This is a disaster.” And he made the choice to just go with it.
McBride: I look back on all these things that we’ve done with HBO, and man, there is nothing better than days showing up on that set and being there with Steve Little and us just getting to fucking rip on each other. It was so much fun. And the same with Walton on Vice Principals and the same on Gemstones with Devine and Edi. I think the pleasure that I take from it is just this idea of we’ve created this world, these characters, and then we get to show up at work and fuck with each other. It’s the best.
Part 2: “I Just Imagined What It Must Be Like to Make That Stuff”
Growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a town off Route 95 about 50 miles south of Washington, D.C., McBride got hooked on movies. At the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he met a group of guys with similar tastes.
McBride: I can remember clearly to this day when our family finally got a VCR. I think we were about two years behind everyone else. I was in fourth grade. That feeling of going to the fucking video store and suddenly being able to rent movies? That concept was so crazy. What you used to only get to see in a theater, you could see in your house as many times as you wanted. And I just was obsessed.
You went to the video store, and you didn’t have an understanding of what all these movies were. It just seemed so cool. There’s all these stories out here, and I haven’t seen any of them, and I want to see them, and where do I begin? When I was younger, it would be any of the action movies and comedies. And then as I got a little older, like high school, it became all horror movies. It was all just trying to rent the most fucked-up-looking movie based on the box.
Stuff that I go back to even to this day that I loved when I was a kid: The Shining was my favorite horror movie of all time. I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when I was a kid. I loved The Goonies. I loved Goodfellas. I loved Taxi Driver. The Last of The Mohicans. God, there’s so many.
Green: Me and Danny and Jody Hill were all on the same floor, and they were a year below me.
Hill: God, the first time we met, man, I think was getting high in college.
Green: Of course the judgments of film school, you just want to know what everybody’s VHS collection is. And I was just really excited because we had a lot of overlap in the diversity of our collections, from absurdist comedies to popcorn and cotton candy blockbusters to weirdo international art films. And it was just cool to see someone with an eclectic taste that matched my own. And we quickly just realized that we had a similar sensibility for dark comedy and emotional comedy and awkward comedy, and that was kind of what our initial creative connection was all about.
More on the World of Danny McBride
Hill: Danny had these sort of populist tastes at the time, and I remember thinking that that was unique. I hadn’t met anybody like that.
Green: He was a big John Hughes fan—so was I—and always had an affection for shit-kicker movies, Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way but Loose. And those were always fun movies to bond on. I still have that collection. It’s on my office shelf. It would be everything from Never Cry Wolf to Scarecrow to Bad News Bears to Sixteen Candles to Predator to Halloween, which came back into play. It’s pretty hard to define what our taste is because the only thing that they all have in common is they’re just good fucking movies.
McBride: Growing up and living in a little town like Fredericksburg and just renting these movies, not only did I like them, but I just imagined what it must be like to make that stuff. There are all these people working together. All these actors, all these directors.
Green: On my first movie, George Washington, he was the second-unit director, and then on my second movie, All the Real Girls, he replaced an actor that had bailed—I think it was his first acting gig outside of film school. He joined the ensemble. It was just second nature to him. It was really fun to see him go from kind of a writing collaborator, directorial colleague, to an in-front-of-the-camera incredible performer.
Hill: I grew up doing tae kwon do. That was my sport growing up, and I owned a school when I was in high school that taught kids and adults. It just seemed really funny that Danny would be a tae kwon do instructor.
McBride: I took karate as a kid. I appreciate it and think it’s cool. It is also silly and just feels like the perfect mashup for the kind of shit we like.
Part 3: “An Awakening of a New Comic Voice”
Starring McBride, directed by Hill, and cowritten by their late creative partner, Ben Best, The Foot Fist Way was shot in North Carolina over 19 days in 2005 on a reported budget of around $70,000. The brutally uncomfortable comedy introduced its mustachioed lead to the world and caught the attention of two comedy kingmakers.
Hill: Where we shot was actually the school that I started. Those kids had all grown up, and the guy that I turned the school over to still owned it and operated it, so they let us shoot and use all the kids for free.
McBride: Foot Fist got into Sundance, into the midnight screening.
Hill: Danny had done All the Real Girls, but he didn’t have as much of a pop after that, you know what I mean? It was a critical success, but it’s not like everybody in Hollywood knew who he was, so we were both just working regular jobs. But really overnight, we had CAA calling us and people in Hollywood wanting to meet. That was really surreal. I mean, Scott Rudin called me on the plane ride to Sundance before we’d even gotten there.
McBride: We didn’t get it sold there, but people were talking about it after, and the word of mouth was spreading.
Green: I’m really proud of Jody for putting it together. I’d done film festivals and had that kind of circuit, but he was getting phone calls from Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.
“What that film looks like is what it was to make. It was just breaking shit and being almost irresponsible, but also having a bit of an ego about it. We knew what we thought was funny, and we were just praying that other people would enjoy that ride.”David Gordon Green, on Pineapple Express
McBride: We got hooked up with Will and Adam.
Adam McKay (in 2008): I was handed it by Jimmy Miller, our manager, and I watched it in my living room, on the computer, by myself, like on a Saturday afternoon, like, “Ugh, I have to watch this.” And then right away, I was like, “Holy crap.”
Will Ferrell (in 2008): I was watching it while working on Blades of Glory in Montreal, on location. We were like, “This is one of the funniest things we’ve ever seen.”
Foot Fist Way was the first movie released by McKay and Ferrell’s Gary Sanchez Productions. “The character’s inarticulateness is dead-on natural and annoying,” Variety critic John Anderson wrote of the film’s protagonist in a positive review. The film had only a limited theatrical run in 2008, but all of a sudden, McBride was appearing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien as Fred Simmons. He even did a tae kwon do demonstration. At the time, the audience didn’t get that it was a joke.
McBride: Before that Conan appearance, I couldn’t eat for three days just because I was so nervous about it. Even navigating press, I didn’t have any point of reference or know how to do it. And then suddenly, it’s a part of the gig. And the thing in Hollywood is you have to pretend like you know what you’re doing, because if anyone figures out that you don’t, they won’t ask you to come back. So there was just a sense of you just have to rise to the occasion and do it. And I do look back and I’m amazed. No wonder I was always stressed out. It was scary.
Green: There was an awakening of a new comic voice, which you could feel. I kind of had one foot in the industry from where I was living in North Carolina at the time. Those phone calls that he was getting? Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen were one of those. And then that led to Pineapple Express for me because he had introduced them to the idea of me wanting to do comedy films. And this was before Eastbound—I hadn’t done anything comedic to speak of.
McBride: When we came on that scene and met Seth and Evan [Goldberg] and Judd and all these guys, it really felt to me and Jody that we had met dudes that we were simpatico with. These guys were all a tight-knit group of people that had been dedicating their lives to being creative at a young age. And we were doing the same thing clear across the country. So the moment that we got to combine forces with them, it just felt like the world was opening up in an interesting way of, like, “Oh, there’s other guys out there like us.”
Robinson: We were shooting Pineapple Express, and he was roasting the shit out of me. I was like, “Who is this motherfucker?” Because he was just firing, just improvising. Boom boom. It was just the best. I was like, “I’ve got to dig in, we not playing with this. This dude is incredible.”
McBride: Those sets were fun. You take it for granted because you’re in the middle of it, but now as you look back, in the movie industry, genres come and go constantly. There’s a time where it’s just all Westerns or musicals or now superhero movies. Everything comes and goes. And I just think we were really lucky that what we wanted to do happened to align with when all that stuff was what audiences wanted to see.
Green: That wasn’t like a movie where we were getting studio notes. They never even showed up on set. Well, one time one of the executives brought their parents to set and turned right back around. But it was lawless fun, and I would ruin takes because I’d keep laughing so hard and had to escort myself off set so that they could finish the scene. What that film looks like is what it was to make. It was just breaking shit and being almost irresponsible, but also having a bit of an ego about it. We knew what we thought was funny, and we were just praying that other people would enjoy that ride.
Part 4: “I Didn’t Cry. I Wept.”
In the 2000s, McBride appeared in box office smash comedies Superbad, The Heartbreak Kid, Pineapple Express, and Tropic Thunder. During that stretch, he and his buddies started to develop a project of their own: Eastbound & Down. McKay and Ferrell executive-produced the series, which premiered in early 2009 and gave us Kenny Powers, the MLB relief pitcher turned gym teacher with the filthiest mouth in the South. Shot mostly in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, the HBO show was both laugh-out-loud funny and somehow moving.
McBride: I’d always been enamored with British television. I liked that there were shorter seasons, and I just felt like it was a little bit more interesting. Regular network TV, that stuff didn’t really appeal to me. I liked the comfort of things like Cheers and The Cosby Show and all these things that I grew up on, but I didn’t look at it as the same thing I was trying to do. But a lot of the British stuff, from Alan Partridge to the original Office, IT Crowd, and Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Spaced—I loved that. I used to watch that over and over again.
And so when we met with Will and Adam, they said, “What do you want to do next?” That’s what I pitched: our version of a British television show. I remember they were surprised by it because, at that point, people would make TV shows to get movies made. I wanted to make something that’s only six episodes long, and it’s on TV, and it’s an antihero that we’re following.
Green: There were a lot of things that people thought were strange about that show. We shot it on 16 mm, and we shot it like a movie. You had to see it episode to episode, and it’s an unlikable character. I think it took a little bit of reassurance from people like us that we see Kenny Powers in a lot of people we grew up with.
Hill: These were the people that either made our lives hell or we made fun of back in the day.
McBride: Even when we made the pilot of Eastbound, I think we were so grateful that we had found an opportunity after The Foot Fist Way. We were very apprehensive about the longevity of our careers. We were thinking, like, “Man, we got here, hopefully we get to just to finish this.”
Little: I do remember Danny saying, “Oh, we got our secret weapon here.” Because when I was cast, I was not a series regular, I was a guest star. So that was how I came on. And who knew, maybe it would’ve just lasted one episode and that’s it.
Mixon Greer: I tested for five different pilots that time, and then my manager said, “Katy, there is a role. There’s a role.” And I guess they were trying to find [Kenny’s love interest] April Buchanon. And so I went in for the first time with them, and it just felt like a divine appointment.
Stephanie Laing (co–executive producer, Eastbound & Down; executive producer, Vice Principals): I remember sitting in the very first sound mix on the pilot of Eastbound & Down, and we were playing the end titles and the song was three frames off and they knew it. They were like, “No, that’s not right.” And I swear we were there for an hour. It has to hit it exactly this point because it’s going to say something very important.
Robinson: What I love about Danny is them guys have been together since college making stuff. You see one, you see the others. It’s just like they have a squad, bro. They’re tight, they’re strong, and they’re all brilliant.
Little: I remember once a new assistant came to work on the show, and most of us were staying at this hotel right on Wrightsville Beach. And we were out playing cornhole, and he said, “Oh, behind the scenes is exactly what you would hope it would be from watching the show.”
Mixon Greer: You just want to hang with Danny, you know what I’m talking about?
Little: You’ve got a good vibe, and there’s a level of trust. One time the prop guy—who didn’t go to college with them—he had worked on Inception. I guess Christopher Nolan was very specific about the type of suitcase he wanted and the dimensions and what it looks like inside. And then he came and did our show. And the prop guy puts a vibrator in the anus of a dinosaur so the dinosaur would move when it turns on. It was an environment where even the prop person felt empowered to come up with an idea.
Robinson: You felt like you could improvise, and then you would hit something and then it would catch on, and then you’d figure out how to tag it and call back to it. The big motorcycle fight. I was just saying something, and Jody was like, “Craig, repeat whatever you were just saying. Repeat.”
Laing: In Season 1, when Danny’s on the Jet Ski in the lake and it runs out of gas, he makes this choice, while Simon & Garfunkel is playing, to step off of it as though he might walk on water. And of course he doesn’t and he falls. And it’s one of the best moments in TV because you’re like, “Does Kenny Powers really think he can walk on water?”
Green: What I like is that your connection to that show depends on your perspective of yourself and culture and mankind. That show can appeal to some really despicable characters that say, “This guy’s just like me.” Or appeal to a college professor at an Ivy League school that says, “This is what makes mankind tick.”
Laing: I would take my son to T-ball, and all the moms would say, “My husband loves your show.”
Goggins: The thing that I responded to in his work was what lies underneath the comedy, right? It’s always the human condition. I laughed like everybody else in the first season of Eastbound & Down. But it was a wounded man underneath that. At the end of Season 1, when he pulls out of that gas station and he leaves [April] standing there? He knows he’s a fraud, he understands it. I wept. I didn’t cry. I wept.
Laing: I would watch the cuts. I cried so much and I was like, “Oh my God, this is really a romantic comedy.” It’s just disguised.
McBride: With every season of it, we were never really sure whether we were going to get to do it again. And so we really just tried to make every season stand on its own. But the ending, I think, had come to me about halfway through shooting Eastbound, having this larger-than-life summation of what it all adds up to for him in his brain. His idea of the happy ending is that his wife gets smoked and he starts a new life and he dies and his sidekick snorts his fucking ashes. He hasn’t changed that much.
Part 5: “This Is What Free Is”
With Eastbound & Down’s four-season run winding down, McBride turned to acting in Hollywood movies like This Is the End and Alien: Covenant. He also developed a second show for HBO. Vice Principals premiered in 2016, a year before he and his pals moved their production company, Rough House Pictures, from Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina.
McBride: You don’t want to fall for the sophomore slump. Historically, if a TV show is successful, it goes on for years and years and years—years when I was wanting to take more of the approach of filmmakers, not wanting to just get narrowed into one thing. So when I set up Vice Principals, it was all going to be filmed at once. I learned enough that when you’re writing for television, you need to give payoffs, but you also have to give the promise of what comes next. And I didn’t want to approach Vice Principals that way. I wanted to think of Vice Principals as its own complete story.
Laing: He started directing, and I think the world grew a little bit. Eastbound was really about Kenny Powers, and all of a sudden with Vice Principals, you had more story lines to follow, even though it was still very centralized on those two characters.
Goggins: I read for Eastbound & Down, and I had braces on at the time. And you know, walked into a room with five comedians there, one of them being Jason Sudeikis, thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here?” But I went in, and I knew that in my heart I’m such a fan of Danny’s, and I thought, “You know what? I have something to offer him, whether he wants it or not.” And it was a great read. And I think I said as much to him in the room. I said, “I think you need me.” Something stupid like that. And afterwards, I got a phone call from David Gordon Green, who was an old friend of mine. And David said, “Danny loved what you did, man. It was dangerous what you did, and we don’t know that we want to go that way for this.” And so Jason wound up doing it.
And then we were at a party, and both Danny and David came up. And we were just talking, and [Danny] said, “I’ve got this thing that I’ve worked on, and I really want you to do it.” And it was Vice Principals. I was doing The Hateful Eight at the time. He sent it, and I read it. Like everybody else who reads a Danny McBride script, I was just giddy with excitement, and I understood it. Right out of the gate. And then the very first table read we did at HBO, I felt like, “Oh, this guy is going to be very important in my life.”
Patterson: When I went to that audition, I had no idea that Danny and Jody were going to be there. I just thought I was going to the casting office to read with Sherry Thomas. I walked in and I was like, “Oh, OK, hi.” And then I just assumed Danny would read with me because that’s who the scenes were with. And he was like, “No, I’m going to watch.” And I don’t know, I just felt from his vibe, “Fuck it. Just go for it.” And so I was throwing some things in. It was such a crazy scene—I’m literally coming up from blowing him in a broom closet.
Gregory: I had a good friend, she has this really eclectic kind of humor, and I was like, “Yo, I think I’m getting ready to audition for this dude that you’ve been talking about for a long time,” and she went bananas. And so I watched a little bit of Eastbound & Down, and I was like, “I don’t know,” to be quite frank. I was like, “That dude in particular, that Kenny dude, I don’t know if he’s my cup of tea.”
So I go into this audition, and I could hear all of this laughter and all of this stuff going on, and I had no idea that Danny and Jody were in the room. I had a lot of reservations. I didn’t watch any interviews of Danny, so I was like, “Yeah, this dude is maybe not my dude.” But it was the opposite. He and Jody were the kindest to me. I still hold them at the top.
Goggins: When you crack up Danny McBride, there is a sense of pride. It’s not even getting Daddy’s approval. It’s just like, “Oh, I made Daddy laugh at the dinner table. Ooh, I’m going to have a good night’s sleep.”
Gregory: I didn’t really struggle in the process until I had to do the scene where I had to get drunk and do what I did on the car. That was my only night that I was like, “Jody, I can’t do this.” Jody was so almost deferential to me in the process, again, like, “Yeah, just do whatever.” And he would call me Ms. Kimberly. They were charming and they were Southern, and all of this stuff was wonderful.
I think they respected that “Hey, she’s not an ad-libber. She’s going to act it through, and if we ask her to, she’ll throw in what she can.” All of these respectability politics started coming up in my head. I’m the Black woman on this show. What are Black people going to think about me being drunk on what is ostensibly a white male show? And this is before we are having these kinds of conversations that we’ve been having in the last eight, nine years. But at that moment, that’s what I started to freak out about. I’m from Texas. My father’s family is from Louisiana and Port Arthur, Texas, which is a really, really small town. I have my cousin, she was like my biggest fan, and she would call the family and be like, “She’s on tonight.” I remember calling either Jody or Danny. I was like, “How can we get around this thing? Do we have to do it?” And I think it was Danny who was like, “Yeah, we’ve got to do it.”
That was it. I was angry in that scene when I’m walking down the street knocking people’s drinks over. But Jody allowed me space. He didn’t try to say, “Can you do this again?” He was just, “Just go.” I did the scene, but I had become very childish and infantile, like, “You’re making me do something I don’t want to do.” But when I was at this theater leadership night and this woman came up to me and was like, “My wife just told me that you’re the actress. We love this show.” And it was a Black woman. And I was like, it just really makes me happy that all of the stuff I was afraid of was not real. And my community in particular really wrapped their arms around Belinda, even though she was being battered in the show in some ways. That was the only moment where I just felt like, “This is too far.” But it also was, I think, the moment where I was like, “Oh, this is what free is.”
Goggins: No one can ruin a take quicker than me. I think Danny’s gone on record as saying that, because I find him as funny as I find Bill Murray. Literally just looking at him walk in a room, drinking coffee, makes me laugh. Whatever he’s doing makes me laugh. But there was this one line on Vice Principals. Danny and I were in the car, on a rig being pulled. Jody was directing it. And I’m going to say we drove around Charleston 25 minutes trying to get this one line in a take where one of us didn’t laugh. I’ll never forget that day.
Laing: We shot that as a summer movie, and we were so lucky to do back-to-back seasons and kayak off of our little houses in Charleston.
Gregory: They were in L.A. when we were doing Vice Principals, initially. Danny, rightfully so, was like, “L.A. is not for me or my family.” And he made, I think, such a wise decision.
McBride: I was always enamored with what that world must be like. And then I got there, and it wasn’t as cool as I thought it was going to be.
Mixon Greer: I think whenever you’re filming elsewhere, it’s always a special situation.
Devine: The sense of community that we have in Charleston, everyone just loves being there and loves working with each other. And it’s the same people that work on all of [Danny’s] stuff all the time. When he moved there, 20 families moved with him. He immediately had his whole crew.
Laing: What a gift to be able to live and work in a space that’s inspiring to you where you don’t feel like you have to be in Hollywood. I think they’ve set something up that’s so enviable, really. It just allows them to continue to tell stories the way that they want to tell them.
McBride: Vice Principals was a way to say, “All right, let’s just focus on telling one story in this format and then be done with it.” And it was that thing where when I finished it, I had such a fucking good time shooting that and working with all those actors that were in it that there was this moment of panic of, like, “Fuck, maybe I should have planned this to be a longer series.” But the magic that we captured was in that moment in time.
Part 6: “A Good Roundhouse Kick Could Solve All Your Problems”
After Vice Principals, McBride and his crew started branching out beyond comedy. Their Halloween reboot, which Green directed and cowrote with McBride and their college friend Jeff Fradley, hit theaters in October 2018 and grossed almost $260 million worldwide. The movie’s two sequels each made more than $100 million.
Green: I got a call one day from Jason Blum, the producer, asking if I’d be interested in talking about rebooting the Halloween franchise with John Carpenter involved. And I just got super excited and butterflies in my stomach and called up Danny and said, “You won’t believe the conversation I just had.”
McBride: My first reaction was like, “Don’t do it. There’s no upside to it. Everyone will hate you.” But then the more we talked about it, I was like, “Well, I think that we have an interesting way into this.”
Green: He says, “You got to let me write it with you. That would be a childhood dream.” I remember driving to the Blumhouse office with Danny, and we were so jacked up on caffeine. I think it was at a time in his life when he was drinking 5-Hour Energy drinks. I was in over my head. And you take those butterflies, and now you’re on rocket fuel. The two of us were talking to Jason and then he says, “Love the idea. Let’s go sit with John Carpenter.”
McBride: I can remember to this day walking into John Carpenter's house. It was unreal. And once we saw that Jamie Lee [Curtis] was interested, it became hard not to get excited about the potential of it.
Green: The snowball of creative, nostalgic passions that we were able to unleash on that franchise was incredible. And it’s one thing to be able to have these opportunities solo. But when you get to bring your college buddy and you’re side by side taking the hits and feeling the wins on this ride together, it’s just so much more fun.
“When I’ve read anything that Danny has done, I see it clearly in my mind. These characters are so three-dimensional that the work required to inhabit them isn’t a lot, really.”Walton Goggins
McBride: When we premiered that first one at TIFF, I was so incredibly nervous. I’m a Halloween fan, and I’ve been mad at things being relaunched before and hated on them. And I’m like, “Oh God, now’s my chance to be in the fucking bull’s-eye.” But man, when we watched that thing with that crowd and then the first time that Jamie goes over the balcony and Michael looks over and she’s gone and it gets into that last cat and mouse in the house, the audience just cheered. I remember sitting next to my wife, and my stomach was in knots. Once they cheered, I was like, “Ah, they like it, they like it. I can come back alive.” It’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had with any audience.
By the late 2010s, McBride had also started working on a show about a dysfunctional family of televangelists. The Righteous Gemstones premiered on HBO in August 2019. It was his version of the kind of prime-time soap opera he’d loved as a kid. “When we were writing the first season, we watched old episodes of Falcon Crest and Dynasty and Dallas,” he told me when I interviewed him for a story in 2021. “All these rich-people-on-compound shows.” Since then, the dramatic comedy has become ridiculously ambitious, pulling off everything from motorcycle chases to a pro wrestling period piece to jet pack sermons to the premiere of the fourth and final season, a gory Civil War–set flashback starring Bradley Cooper as the first Gemstone preacher.
McBride: Gemstones ended up being something where we defied any sort of genre rules. We could shoot a musical number, we could shoot an action sequence, we could shoot straight comedy. Gemstones, in its own crazy way, just allowed us to stretch creatively. That made it very, very enjoyable to do.
Goggins: When I’ve read anything that Danny has done, I see it clearly in my mind. These characters—these people, rather—are so three-dimensional. Absurd, for sure. Satirical, absolutely. But they’re so three-dimensional that the work required to inhabit them isn’t a lot, really.
Patterson: I just think he goes straight toward what he thinks is funny and good and is able somehow to not get bogged down in “Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but …” Or being too PC. He just goes straight into “Oh, this is a real type of person that has made me laugh before, so why don’t we dive in deep?”
Laing: It’s almost like sitting in an airport waiting for your flight, and you see the most interesting people walk by and you just wonder what their lives are.
Tony Cavalero (Keefe Chambers, The Righteous Gemstones): I remember people would be like, “Where did you find that Keefe character? Is he literally a gas station attendant in your cast?”
Devine: Danny called me and was like, “Would you be interested in playing my brother?” And I was like, “Yeah, I think I can make that work.” We met once, and I embarrassed myself. It was an afterparty for This Is the End, I think. I’m smoking weed with Seth Rogen. I’m trying to go toe-to-toe with Seth, and I’m just getting buried. I am under the table high, and through this cloud of smoke, Danny appears. I was such a fan of his, and he’s on my Mount Rushmore of comedy.
And I said to him, “You’re Danny McBride.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I know. What’s up, man, nice to meet you.” And I go, “You’re a bright shooting star.” And he goes, “OK?” Kind of weirded out by it. And I went and grabbed my girlfriend at the time, and I’m like, “I have to leave.” And she’s like, “Why? It’s a fun party. I’m having a good time.” And I go, “I just called Danny McBride a bright shooting star.” And she’s like, “You’re right, we do.”
Goggins: At first, I was a little offended. You want me to play your 70-year-old uncle? And I think HBO also, they were like, “No, he can’t do that.” And so we had to do a camera test. And then they said, “Oh, yeah, he could absolutely do that.”
Devine: When you show up on Danny’s set, you’re like, “I’m going to fucking bring it because I want these guys to love what I do.” I mean, he’s the best boss I’ve ever had.
Laing: There’s just such a specificity in the way he embodies his characters. The way he walks, his mannerisms—it’s like there’s no one like him.
Patterson: There’s a vibe thing that happens when he’s in the Cape and Pistol stuff, and it’s a haughtiness of trying to be the boss and trying to be cocky, but at the same time looking so dumb and twirling your cape. There’s something in that overconfidence that I think is the sweet spot for him and kills me. Kills me till I’m crying.
Baltz: It’s like, “I’m in charge. I’m in control.” Very king of fools. Then it starts to go wrong. One of my favorite moments of that was when we were filming the cousins dinner in Season 3, and he gets frustrated about not wanting to play Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers. Remember how he was saying it? It sounded like he couldn’t get [the words] out.
Cavalero: I remember the first time I read that the tip of my dick was going to be hanging below my shirt in Season 1. That was filmed at 4 o’clock in the morning. Danny had to turn around to do his lines off camera because every time I’d walk out, all I’d see was him laughing.
Laing: Watching him direct has been, honestly, inspiring. I mean, the first episode of Gemstones this season, I emailed Danny and was like, “Holy shit, what was that?”
McBride: I’m so involved in the writing of it that people have to bring me back down to earth and be like, “Yo, who’s going to be in this shit?” And for this [Season 4 premiere], I had never really thought about what it was going to be. And so then when we were sitting here talking about “Well, who would be good? If none of the cast is going to be in it, it needs to be somebody that the audience will be excited to see in this world.” And I was like, “Somebody like Bradley Cooper.” You’re just throwing it out. And then we sent it to him, and he responded to it right away. So we really, really lucked out. It was awesome that he did it.
Hill: Danny’s always been ambitious. I kind of always thought that Danny would do something really big in his life.
Green: Recently I was rewatching Raising Arizona. I was showing it to my kids for the first time. And I was thinking, “This is the birth of Danny McBride.” It’s dark sometimes, it’s cartoonish sometimes, it’s emotional sometimes. It just checks all these boxes.
McBride: At the end of the day, what I don’t think has changed is when we made The Foot Fist Way, we felt like outsiders. We went to film school in North Carolina. We were way outside of the system, and we were trying to make something that we wanted to see. And I feel like that has remained the same. Even though we have this fucking budget on Gemstones, it still feels like, in a way, that we’re just as far removed from the industry as we were when we were making The Foot Fist Way.
With this crew and with these people, I love them all so much and they’re great. I easily could have shifted into autopilot and done this for another five or six years. But who would I be at that point, and what would I have created? I don’t know. I think there’s something more exciting about trying to figure out how you follow this up than just staying in this zone.
Laing: I mean, he might hate doing it, but I would love to see him do a hard drama.
Goggins: I think there’s something in the world of travel that is different than Mike [White’s] interpretation. I believe that there’s a Danny McBride story in another country. I hope that he goes in that direction at some point. To see Danny try to navigate a world that is very foreign to him is just something that I think I would laugh at to no end.
Hill: I could see him doing some major genre stuff. Maybe like a Jordan Peele kind of thing, but Danny’s version of it. I could see him going into space. I could see him doing history. I could see him doing all kinds of things.
Gregory: I’ve seen Danny with and around his family, and that is something that speaks more than what I see someone doing on their set. A really gentle, fatherly sci-fi world would be really interesting to see Danny in. Danny has a good-soul-ness to him, and I would love to see him play something where that kind of shines through.
McBride: There’s so much. Just wait and see.
Green: Inside the absurdist comic voice is an intellectual with great mythological understanding.
McBride: I grew up in the ’80s, and martial arts was something that you definitely saw in the movies, and it seemed like a good skill to have—to be able to beat somebody’s ass, to be able to take a bad guy out. It hearkens back to an age when life was simpler. A good roundhouse kick could solve all your problems.
