From ‘Hot Rod' to ‘Eastbound' to ‘Gemstones,' Danny McBride breaks down his most righteous roles: ‘It's been an absolute blast'

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The Gold Standard is a Gold Derby series where we speak to legendary figures in Hollywood who take us through their award-worthy greatest hits. Below, Danny McBride revisits his greatest hits, up to the recently concluded, Emmy-contending, always side-splitting The Righteous Gemstones.
There's been no shortage of Hollywood producers and filmmakers who have enlisted Danny McBride to bring his inimitable brand of coarse, Southern-drawled comedy to their projects. But whether it's The Foot Fist Way or Eastbound & Down or Vice Principals or The Righteous Gemstones, the most enduring, most McBride-ian works don't merely feature the onscreen talents of the 48-year-old Georgia native. He has played a formidable role in creating them.
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'I would definitely not make it as an actor if I had to rely on other people hiring me to sustain my career,' McBride tells Gold Derby. 'I don't think I could pull it off.'
Here's a long look at what McBride has pulled off both behind and in front of the camera over the past 25 years.
After graduating from University of North Carolina School of the Arts, McBride worked as a second unit director on his college friend David Gordon Green's acclaimed debut feature George Washington (2000) before playing a supporting role (as 'Bust-Ass') in Green's equally acclaimed follow-up, All the Real Girls (2003).
I went to film school with David Green, and he was actually my next-door neighbor my freshman year of college. David graduated a year before me. We went to film school in North Carolina. It's a long way from New York City or Los Angeles, where people would typically go to film school at that time period. And it was like incredibly inspiring to see him graduate from school and a year later, come back to Winston-Salem and make a movie [George Washington]. When he was able to launch his career from that, it just sort of gave all of us, [myself and] my classmates, that inspiration that it can be done, you just have to figure out a way. But it's possible. Those two things really just sort of kickstarted my personal ambitions to push myself to do this. And once I got in All the Real Girls, when Jody Hill wanted to make the Foot Fist Way and we wrote that together. I was the only person that we knew that had been in a movie before. So that made me just slightly more qualified than our other friends to act in that. But [at film school], I didn't have any ambitions of being an actor at all. I just I felt like I could do it, and I just would do it when people needed me to.
Written by McBride, Jody Hill, and Ben Best Best, and directed by Hill, The Foot Fist Way starred McBride as a foul-mouthed taekwondo instructor in a small southern town. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay made it their first acquisition for their newly formed banner Gary Sanchez Productions.
We made it for 70 grand. We shot it on Super 16 [mm] and we had one camera to shoot it on, which is interesting because everything that we do now, we shoot multiple cameras [so] we can make sure that we get all the improv or any of that stuff that comes off the cuff. But with that, we didn't have that ability. We had one camera and we had no video playback. There was no way to see if what we just shot was in focus. We were just kind of running and gunning. I think we shot that whole thing in about two weeks, and it was just all hands on deck, just trying to make that dream a reality.
I think it was everything [having Ferrell and McKay support it and produce it]. I owe so much to those two guys and for them to have faith to give our show that chance, to shine a light on what we were doing. The movie got one of the midnight screenings at Sundance. And so we were thrilled that it even just got to Sundance. It was going to have an audience. But then we left Sundance and the movie hadn't sold or anything. So it was kind of this moment of like, 'Well, that was fun making it.' And we feel proud, but we're not sure if anyone else will ever see this movie again. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay were just starting Gary Sanchez Productions at the time. And it came across their desk and they became champions of it. And then it started to kind of like float around the town, and next thing you know, living in Virginia, Jody's writing for reality TV shows, and then suddenly we're being invited to the set of Judd Apatow's Knocked Up and meeting Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and all of these guys. Everything just kind of exploded from that point on.
McBride's first major studio role came as the green tea-fueled Rico Brown in the Lonely Island comedy Hot Rod starring Andy Samberg as an accident-prone wannabe stuntman.
It was awesome meeting the Lonely Island guys, Andy, Akiva [Schaffer], Jorma [Taccone]. Those were like some of the first guys I met that were in this industry that were doing it, and I met them and quickly saw that they had a lot in common with what my friends and I were trying to do, that they had been childhood friends and they were trying to make their specific brand of comedy.
And so I put myself on tape for that. And I remember being so excited about getting it, not just for the opportunity, but I just wanted to get to know those guys. I just felt like they were so talented and so funny, and I was just really kind of hoping that I would get a chance to work with them. And on the set of that, I met Bill Hader. Then I became good buds with him. It really kind of stuck that that summer. Foot Fist Way went to Sundance in 2006. And the next year, my life was absolutely insane. I basically went from Hot Rod, shot that in Vancouver, left there, came back to L.A. to shoot this movie called Drillbit Taylor with Owen Wilson, and then left the set of that to go shoot Heartbreak Kid with Ben Stiller.
And then met Ben on there, and he gave me the script for Tropic Thunder. And so then went home for Christmas, came back to L.A., shot Pineapple Express, left the set of that. Shot the pilot of Eastbound and Down, then left the set of that and went to Hawaii to go shoot Tropic Thunder. It was f--king crazy. all my heroes. I mean … I didn't have any training as an actor, so I didn't even know what the hell I was doing. And it was sort of that imposter syndrome of just [thinking] every day, this is too good to be true. Surely there'll be a moment where someone realizes that I shouldn't be here and sends me packing, but luckily it didn't happen.
McBride was a major scene stealer opposite James Franco and Seth Rogen in this stoner comedy as the eccentric drug dealer Red. It also reteamed him with Green, who directed Rogen and Goldberg's script, and included a notorious, extended close confines fight scene against the two lead stars.
It was really special. Seth and those, they were on a pretty incredible run then … coming off of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. They were shooting Superbad. And then they had this script for Pineapple Express and I was over the moon when they offered that to me. To be able to play with those guys and see what they're going to do, and then when they were looking for directors, I think they just were starting to kind of pay attention to what our crew was doing. And our guys and I had told them that David Green made some of the funniest movies that were at our school. At that point he had only made sort of these serious Indies. But I knew he had a very wicked sense of humor that was very distinct and mischievous. So those guys sat down with David, and then he was booked on it, and we were off to the races.
[The fight scene] I think was my first week of filming. With Seth and Franco coming in, and I'm explaining to them that it was my cat's birthday. I mean, we were just riffing. All that stuff was just riff. We were just pulling it all out of our ass. And it was so much fun to play with those guys. And I mean, that was a long fight. Shoot. I remember everyone got hurt at some point. I got concussed, I got hit in the back of the head with a bong and that kind of laid me out for a few moments. I think Seth broke his hand or fractured his hand or something. Everybody was getting banged up, but it felt like you weren't really participating in the fight scene if you didn't have some scars by the end of it.
McBride stole even more scenes as the trigger-happy explosives expert on the set of a Hollywood war movie in this hit comedy directed by Stiller, who costarred with Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, Bill Hader, Matthew McConaughey, Nick Nolte, Tom Cruise, and more.
That was that was such an insane shoot. I mean, it was like movie star camp … I was the new kid on the block. And suddenly I'm at a table reading with Tom Cruise and Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. I mean, I was just trying not to shit my pants the entire time.
But I can remember that it took a while to shoot that first sequence in Tropic Thunder, where it's the war scene at the beginning. I think it was almost like three weeks of shooting. And every day there's so much going on there. And so every day everyone was called in and you had no idea if you were going to be on camera or not. And I was so nervous. I hadn't said a word in this movie yet. And every day I would go in with my stomach in knots, up in that tower, waiting to blow the whole scene up. And every day I would get ready for it. And then the day would move on and they're not going to get to me. They're still shooting stuff with Steve Coogan, or they're still shooting helicopters flying in. And so for three weeks, I was just like at the edge of my seat every day, like, 'F--k, I got to do this. And in front of all these people.' And they finally got to me, like on the last day of [shooting there]. They just came up into the tower and just let me rip it. And I was just pulling all these lines out of my ass and just trying to make Ben laugh.
It was all just sort of improv and I remember as soon as it was done, everyone on the crew started clapping and I was so relieved. Basically, I could breathe, finally. And Ben was like, 'You know, you did it. That's that.' And so I felt like I had passed the first test, but it was definitely three weeks of just sitting on the edge of my seat of like, 'Am I going to get canned when I open my mouth in this movie? Is that what everyone's going to realize I don't belong here?'
McBride created Eastbound & Down with Foot Fist Way collaborators Hill and Best shortly after their indie film breakout scored a release from Paramount Vantage. It starred McBride as the very politically incorrect Kenny Powers, a disgraced ex-pro baseball player forced to return to his small hometown, and became a cultishly adored hit for HBO.
After we got [Foot Fist Way] set up, Will and Adam were curious of what we wanted to do next. I just had a vision of just moving into television, and they were kind of surprised about that because most people were trying to get out of TV to make movies. This was in 2006, so TV wasn't quite what it is right now. But there was something about the format of storytelling, about breaking a comedy and having like three or four hours to tell a story as opposed to just an hour and a half. It just felt like we could be a little bit more outside the box and maybe take some more risks and chances and maybe create something a little bit more unexpected.
I would just sort of make choices and decisions based on what I wanted to see. I don't think it was really until maybe a season or two into Eastbound, where I started to kind of feel confident in what we were doing. Jodi and I were very lucky on Eastbound because I think if we would have made that as a film, I think it would have probably done nothing. And at that time period, a lot of these comedies were really going through the test screening process, where you put the movie up in front of a test audience and people would give their opinions. Like Foot Fist Way, they put that to a test. I mean, it was fucking abysmal. I think [the score] was in the 30s or something, and it was because it was unexpected and it was strange and it wasn't like other stuff that was out there. And I just kind of knew that our tone and our style wouldn't survive that process.
It takes a little bit for people to get their heads around what we were doing, especially with the kind of characters we were choosing to tell stories about. So I don't think at the beginning our stuff was made for a mass audience. But I think the more we created stuff, I think the audience caught up to what we were doing and started to understand our style more.
Kenny is so, so special. They are all my children. I've had a good time inhabiting all of these sickos. But, yeah, Kenny was just something really special. Even just [with] the making of every season of that, we were going through so many different things in our lives. And it was with just all my friends from film school. And then suddenly… Adam McKay's there, and Will Ferrell was there. And the next season we're all down in Puerto Rico shooting another season, and every season someone else would get married or someone else would have kids. I don't go back and watch things again. But every now and then people will send me clips from the show and instantly be transported in time to what that felt like and how exciting that was and how much fun we were all having.
I get that question a lot, [if we're surprised we got away with being so politically incorrect]. But it wasn't like people were asking for that even then. We definitely would get hounded by critics for some of the stuff that was in there. I think that Kenny's wrongheadedness always was an extension of his character. So for us, it felt like you could get away with that stuff as much as you could get away with a character murdering someone. None of it is admirable. I think ultimately, there's obviously risky, crazy shit in there, but I think all of it was an extension of that character. And I think when you're showing a character, there's latitude there to explore things that are uncomfortable or that sometimes hit those third rails if it's in service of a story and not necessarily in service of just insulting people or just trying to be provocative. For us, as provocative as some of that shit was, it always to us felt like it served a larger purpose.
McBride's status as a major contemporary comedy force was even further solidified when he was cast as 'himself' alongside other self-satirizing stars Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson and Jay Baurchel in this apocalyptic comedy directed by Rogen and Goldberg.
It was honestly so much fun. I mean, what Seth and Evan built over those several years for R-rated comedies, it was sort of like unprecedented for our generation at that time. I always would look back at groups of people who made things I loved. Like growing up, watching all the old John Hughes movies or knowing that George Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg and [Francis Ford] Coppola and those guys all knew each other, or even just like watching the old cast from SNL, and seeing this group of people having fun, being around each other, creating, there's something about it and that's always what I love the most about comedies. Things like Ghostbusters and just seeing all these different talents working on something together. And I think with what Seth and Evan and Judd created for those several years, it was fun to see those familiar faces. It was fun to see everyone in something together. And that one especially was just an absolute blast because everybody was friends on there.
And the fact that Seth and Evan were directing and there was nobody else calling the shots. It was these guys who were in the trenches with us making it, and man, we would have these 45-minute long takes. We would have takes that we would have to stop because the cameras overheated. They were running for so long and you would just go into a time warp. [They] would yell 'Action!' and then it was almost like the Holy Spirit was speaking through you. You just start speaking in tongues, just saying the most awful shit and just going at one another. And it was a complete joy.
Vice Principals, created by McBride and Hill and starring McBride and Walton Goggins as two co-administrators vying for their high school's top post, only lasted two seasons on HBO. But it begot a fruitful relationship for McBride and his future Righteous Gemstones costar Goggins.
The first time I met Walton, he actually had come in to audition for the third season of Eastbound. He was auditioning the role that ultimately went to Jason Sudeikis. And we were already kind of down the road with Sudeikis when Walton read, and so I was already going with [Sudeikis], but I was just so struck by Walton. I instantly felt pulled towards him and liked him and was just like, 'Oh man, I want to know more about this dude.' He's such a live wire. And so he was on my radar ever since then. And actually when we were shooting This Is the End down in New Orleans, he was down there for Django [Unchained]. So sometimes at the bars down in New Orleans, our two crews would end up at the same place every now and then, and I ran into Walton a few times down there.
Though longtime creators Jody Hill and David Gordon Green are executive producers, McBride created HBO's The Righteous Gemstones — which follows a family of wealthy televangelists – by himself. Like Eastbound, McBride (who lives in Charleston, S.C.) filmed Gemstones in and around Wilmington, N.C.
[Creating these stories and characters] is kind of what drives me more than anything. I just love telling stories, and I like creating stories, and it's honestly part of why I'm closing the chapter on Gemstones, as much fun as I've had making the show. As much as I love the entire cast and I've loved making it, I just want to tell more stories. And I see how quick time's moving on and I've been on Gemstones since I wrote the pilot in 2017. And it's been an absolute blast, but my brain is just firing and wanting to tell other stories as well. For me, that's kind of my driving force. What inspires me the most is just trying to find a new world and new characters to explore.
I've never had a negative reaction to [the religious aspects]. I mean, it's not to say that maybe people haven't had a negative response, but it's been surprisingly positive. I think if you're a religious person, you might be turned off by, like, the profanity. And Walton Goggins's d--k hanging out. But ultimately, you also kind of despise these false prophets as well. This is a type of ministry that I don't think anyone who's religious really is trying to defend. And being from this region and even growing up in a religious house, I don't think the M.O. of the show was ever to be like a takedown of religion by any means. I really wanted us to walk a fine line that the butt of the joke was never someone's faith or was never belief. The butt of the joke was hypocrisy. And that's where we would find our humor. We wouldn't find it in mocking what people believe ultimately at the end of the day. And so I feel good about how we rode that line. And I think when you do that, I think you invite more people to come and enjoy the show.
The [guest stars] have all been so awesome. I mean, any time we can convince anyone to come down here and play with us, we've never been disappointed, which is great. Everybody from Bradley Cooper to Sturgill Simpson to Joe Jonas and Steve Zahn and Lukas Haas and Eric Roberts, it's been absolutely nuts. The people that we've been able to talk into coming out here this season, Seann [William Scott] and Megan [Mullally] and last season, Kristen [Johnston], it's been a lot of fun.
That's the thing I kind of enjoyed the most about my career in general. Just growing up watching movies, watching TV, being addicted to that stuff, with my career I've been able to use it as a way to service my fandom for all these different actors and different filmmakers. Whether it's showing up on Ridley Scott set for [Alien: Covenant] and getting to meet him and see what he's all about to casting people [like] Lukas Haas in the third season. Growing up, Witness and Lady in White were two of my favorite movies. And I wasn't bashful about telling him that. So sometimes when we cast these people, it's just an excuse for me to get to meet people I've always admired.
I will miss [Gemstones], and I miss all of them. I have good, fond memories of Eastbound and VPs. And I have so many great memories about Gemstones. But I'll keep working on something new, and if I wouldn't have stopped those shows, then I wouldn't have had Gemstones. So I just think about what's next? And what's the next world? And who are the next people I'll be able to talk into coming down here and f--king around with me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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