Latest news with #Gemstones'
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Danny McBride and ‘The Righteous Gemstones' Team Say Goodbye to the HBO Comedy: ‘F—, I'm About to Start Crying'
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the series finale of 'The Righteous Gemstones,' now streaming on Max. In the end, 'The Righteous Gemstones' said goodbye as only 'The Righteous Gemstones' could: with a masturbating monkey. More from Variety Adam Devine of 'The Righteous Gemstones' on Kelvin's Big Moment and Doing His Own Stunts: 'It Looked Like an Alien Was Trying to Escape My Body' How Danny McBride Cast [SPOILER] in an Epic Civil War Battle for 'The Righteous Gemstones' Season 4 Premiere: 'My Pie-in-the-Sky Pick' Tim Baltz Mastered Pole Dancing for 'The Righteous Gemstones' Season 4: 'I Did Most of My Own Stunts' Though most of the HBO series' final episode, 'That Man of God May Be Complete,' takes place at the titular televangelist family's palatial vacation home, the last scene actually filmed was from the prior episode. After Sunday services, the Gemstones and their entourage have decamped to Jason's Steakhouse, the gang's favorite place to hold court and hit the salad bar. There, Dr. Watson — the capuchin monkey who acts as a service animal for BJ Barnes (Tim Baltz), a Gemstone in-law who's been paralyzed in a freak pole-dancing accident — pleasures himself and smokes menthol cigarettes as the crowd eggs him on. It's a very 'Gemstones' blend of creatively crude and strangely sweet. 'Church lunch scenes are always my favorite scenes to shoot,' says Danny McBride, the creator, star, and executive producer of the four-season comedy. (McBride also directed the finale, sharing script credit with longtime collaborators John Carcieri and Jeff Fradley.) 'We usually have a whole day to do it, and it's everyone from the cast there and everyone has fun.' But that day last fall, McBride wasn't in the mood to stop and smell the roses. He was just trying to make it through a grueling production that had already sustained such calamities as the devastation of Hurricane Helene on the 'Gemstones' home base of South Carolina. Even that day, Baltz learned his mother had been in a car accident and wasn't sure whether he could complete the scene. 'I was so obsessed with just getting it over the finish line that I didn't really take pause to think about the weight of like, 'Oh, we're finished. We've done it,'' McBride recalls. But then Gregory Alan Williams, who plays Gemstone consigliere Martin, pulled him aside to express his gratitude. 'As soon as we started talking, I was like, 'Fuck, I'm about to start crying. Is this going to be sad?'' Viewers may have had a similar question in mind as they watched the final minutes of 'That Man of God May Be Complete.' In past seasons, 'The Righteous Gemstones' has gone big before going home; in the Season 3 finale, a literal plague of locusts descends on a TV studio and razes it to the ground. But the series' final action set piece is dramatically, terrifyingly stripped down. Enraged by the recent loss of his father, despite his role in it, family friend Corey Milsap (Seann William Scott) goes on a rampage through the Gemstone lake house Galilee Gulch, wounding all three siblings — Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine) — via gunshot. For several agonizing minutes, we're left to wonder whether this could really be the end for them, only for Dr. Watson to save the day when he fetches Jesse's gun from his cross-body bag for men. (It's certainly not a purse.) McBride did, in fact, want to mess with his audience a bit. 'Maybe it's just because, as humans, we're all sickos inside,' he says. 'But when a show's ending, my initial knee-jerk [response] is like, 'Who are they going to kill off?' It felt fun to play with that concept and really commit to it.' That meant a smaller-scale climax than 'The Righteous Gemstones' had pulled off in the past: 'It should feel haunting. It should feel scary and unsettling and oddly grounded for how ridiculous it is.' But there was also a thematic reason to have the Gemstones face their final challenge on their own. 'I always had the idea that in the end, they would be tested to see if they ultimately have what it would take to do this job, without monster trucks or jet packs or anything,' McBride says, referencing a couple stunts the series has pulled off in the past. 'I always imagined that the culmination at the end would be stripped down, simple, back to basics, just praying.' So after subduing Corey, the trio pray for him together as he lays dying. The Gemstone kids already share authority over their family's multimillion-dollar empire. Here, though, they work together on the fundamental mission that's supposed to underwrite all the glitz, glamour and Prayer Pods: offering spiritual guidance to congregants' eternal souls. The moment also calls back to the season premiere, an episode-length flashback starring Bradley Cooper as ancestor Elijah, a thief who accidentally becomes a Confederate chaplain and finds God along the way. McBride wrote the premiere's cold open — in which Elijah murders a preacher while robbing his collection box, then assumes his identity — several years ago. It took until the series' home stretch to find a place to put the scene, and expand the idea into an explanation of not just where the Gemstones come from, but who they are. 'They have this roundabout way of attaining righteousness,' says Carcieri, a longtime collaborator of McBride's dating back to their days in film school. (He continues to rep the University of North Carolina via T-shirt on our Zoom.) 'So many of the things they're doing are misguided and not on the right path, but at the heart of it all, they still do believe in God, and they still do pray in earnest.' Just as a career criminal Elijah, whose gold-plated Bible has been passed down through the generations, could become a sincere believer by praying for soldiers about to be executed, his descendants can be their best selves by helping a lost soul who just tried to murder them. 'This is who they are, in their blood and in their bones, and this is their legacy,' says Patterson, who wrote for the show in addition to starring in it. 'Them gathered around [Corey], praying for him — I think, in a way, it's even bigger than a full-on, massive action thing. It's weirdly got more punch.' The entire sequence unfolds at Galilee Gulch, played in the show by a mansion on Lake Murray, just outside the state capital of Columbia, that happens to be the largest single-family residence in South Carolina, at around 18,000 square feet. Finding the house was an enormous challenge for McBride and locations manager Kale Murphy; initial candidates weren't distinct enough from the Gemstones' other residences, and the search took so long McBride nearly called HBO to request a pause in production. But in a miracle that's only fitting for a show about religion, Murphy cold-called the mansion's owners, who agreed to let the 'Gemstones' crew take over for two entire weeks. Even better, the house happened to feature a 16th-century altar imported from a church in England and repurposed into a fireplace. The piece became the backdrop to Corey's big death scene. The lake house was a corner of both Southern bourgeois culture and Gemstone lore that McBride and his team were eager to explore. 'One thing I always thought was cool about the first three 'Star Wars' movies was, they would take those characters' and bring them into radically different environments, McBride says. 'These are those characters in the snow. These are those characters in the jungle.' I was always looking for, 'Where have we not seen the Gemstones before?'' Galilee Gulch also played into the otherwise coddled Gemstone kids' core trauma: they haven't visited since the loss of their mother, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), just before the events of the show. Letting a house of that size sit untouched is an act of thoughtless extravagance. It's also, in part, an understandable act of grief. 'We always knew the show was about dealing with loss — how to persevere as a family, even though they've lost their their matriarch,' Carcieri says. Another loose thread the writers had toyed with for years before weaving it into the final season was a romantic storyline for paterfamilias Eli (John Goodman) in a definitive act of moving on. Eli ultimately strikes up a romance with Corey's mother Lori (Meghan Mullally), Aimee-Leigh's best friend and musical collaborator. That storyline gave us the gift of Karen Walker and Sulley from 'Monsters Inc.' in a passionate 69 — and closure for a family unit missing its center of gravity. 'The Righteous Gemstones' has always been a big tent spanning several genres at once. It's partly a musical, and has some of the most ambitious action on television this side of 'The Last of Us.' At its core, though, the show is a comedy, and whatever its parallels to 'Succession' as the saga of three siblings squabbling over their aging father's empire, it was never going to end on as down a note as Kendall Roy contemplating suicide. After the showdown at Galilee Gulch, the ultimate ending of 'The Righteous Gemstones' is at Kelvin's wedding to Keefe (Tony Cavalero), his best friend turned partner once the deeply repressed youngest Gemstone comes out of the closet. Kelvin's sexuality is accepted with an ease that may be surprising for a group of red state evangelicals, but leaves every Gemstone child in a happy, healthy, stable relationship. Even Eli and Lori decide to give things another go despite the Gemstones' role in the death of her son and abusive ex-husband. 'Ultimately, the fun thing about the Gemstones is they win,' says Patterson, laughing. 'Do what you fucking want to them. You cannot make them not win.' McBride did toy with the idea of giving the Gemstones some final comeuppance for their many failings as people. (This season alone, they had Keefe dress in drag as the ghost of Aimee-Leigh to dissuade Eli from dating Lori.) 'There were always thoughts about, 'Does the church go down? Do they get arrested? And like, ultimately, for me, I don't know if I really want to see that,' he recalls. 'The design for me is, I want people to watch this again, and I want it to be something that ultimately feels fun.' Though he jokes that his next plan is to 'probably make a sandwich,' McBride is eager to move onto the next series that will join 'Gemstones,' 'Vice Principals' and 'Eastbound & Down' in an unbroken chain of acclaimed HBO series. Along with Patterson and author Grady Hendrix, he's developing an adaptation of the novel 'The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.' Whatever makes it to air next, though, it'll be in conjunction with the team at Rough House Pictures, the production house McBride co-founded with David Gordon Green and Jody Hill whose informal roster includes consistent presences like Carcieri and a local South Carolina crew that often carries over from project to project. That relative consistency in an inconsistent industry contributed to the choice to end 'The Righteous Gemstones' on its own terms. 'Whatever we do next, those people will be a part of it,' Carcieri says. So as bittersweet as it is to say goodbye, 'I have faith in the talented people that we work with that we'll come up with something good.' Besides, McBride penned the pilot of 'The Righteous Gemstones' in 2017; between four seasons, two strikes and a pandemic, making the show has taken up eight years of the Rough House crew's lives, leaving them excited for a blank slate. 'When we wrote that Civil War episode, it flowed like water,' Carcieri adds, 'just because we were writing in this new setting, with new characters.' 'It's part of why I kind of wanted to put a pin in 'Gemstones' for now, because I do see how much time creating a story and creating a show takes,' McBride says. No matter how much fun he's had with these demented, selfish, slightly-more-grown-but-by-no-means-mature people, he's making the very un-Gemstones choice to say he's had enough for now: 'There's more stories I want to tell, and more things I want to do.' Best of Variety Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Netflix in May 2025
Los Angeles Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Adam Devine
Adam Devine ('Workaholics,' 'Pitch Perfect'), who reprises his role as youth pastor Kelvin Gemstone on the HBO televangelist comedy 'The Righteous Gemstones' for a fourth and final season that begins airing (and streaming on Max) Sunday, won't share many details about how the Danny McBride–created series ends, besides that it goes out big. 'It ends with a bang,' Devine said in a recent interview with The Times. 'And I think people are really going to love it.' He's far less reticent when it comes to talking about things like the basketball-themed birthday party in the works for his son (he and wife Chloe Bridges welcomed their first child in February 2024), which 'Gemstones' co-star would make the best weekend wingman in the City of Angels ('Obviously it's going to have to be Danny,' he said. 'Danny knows how to have a good time') and his ideal Sunday itinerary in L.A., which starts with table pancakes and ends with a scroll through whatever garbage his Instagram algorithm is serving up. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity. 9 a.m.: Snap into some table pancakes at Blu Jam CafeI would take a leisurely morning, get up, do my stretches — really limber myself up for the big day that I'm about to have — and then we're hitting the town. I think I'd probably go to the Blu Jam Cafe on Melrose [Avenue]. It's this cute little spot, and there's usually a line, especially on Sundays. But you can walk up and down Melrose and do some shopping while you wait for your table. I try to eat a little healthy, so I always get the protein scramble. But then I'm a naughty boy and I'll order blueberry pancakes for the table as well so everyone can have a pancake. But most of the time it's just me and my wife, so it's basically a stack of pancakes for the two of us, which is a perfect scenario. Maybe I'll have a mimosa or two. 10:30 a.m.: Grab some hot nuts at the Original Farmers MarketThen I love going to the Original Farmers Market and just walking around. When I first got to L.A. [from Iowa at 18], I didn't know what to do or where to go, and people said just go to the Grove and walk around. And that's how I found the Farmers Market. I thought I'd discovered this hidden jewel and was like, 'Does anyone know about this place?' Then I walked in, and yeah, people know about this place. I love all the little old little stands. I like getting habanero pistachios [from the Magic Nut & Candy Co.] so I'll do that and then walk around with my hot nuts. I had my first-ever celebrity spotting here. He was the limo driver in the movie 'Blank Check,' and he was at that tiny little bar in the middle [Bar 326] drinking a beer. I don't even know the guy's name, but it floored me to see someone that I'd seen in the movies. I wanted to sit next to him and order a beer, but I was only 18 years old, so I couldn't do that. So I was just eating hot nuts from afar staring at the limo driver from 'Blank Check,' and he could have been George Clooney to me. Noon: Make for a matinee at the GroveI'd [hang at the Farmers Market] for maybe an hour or so and then catch a matinee at [AMC the Grove 14]. Even though it's a big theater chain. I love the Grove, and I love that theater. It's one of those places where my wife and I have been going for years, and it was one of the first movie theaters I went to when I first came to L.A. — that and the ArcLight, RIP. The last movie I saw [at the Grove] was 'Gladiator II.' 3 p.m.: Enjoy a date with Ms. Pac-ManThen I might go to Barcade in Highland Park. It's sort of for my generation — the older millennials — who actually did go to arcades in the malls. Now we get to play all these old arcade games we remember from our childhood and have a couple beers while we do it. Embarrassingly, [the game I'm really good at] is 'Ms. Pac-Man.' It's the nerdiest game to play, but I'll go and spend 50 cents and play for an hour. And all my friends are like, 'Do you want to do something else or go anywhere else?' And I'm like, 'I'm good right here.' In fact, I'm such a dork about 'Ms. Pac-Man' that I have a tabletop version at my house, but when I go to Barcade I'll still play. Don't tell my wife, but Ms. Pac-Man is my mistress. 5 p.m.: Dip into a French dipThen I probably would go to Philippe the Original downtown. The straight [classic beef] French dip and the potato salad are my one-two punch. I get such a kick out of seeing the guys who have worked there for 40 years. It just goes to show how good they are to their people [and] what a good work environment it must be. They've worked at the same place for 40 years and they can still find happiness doing the same job they've done forever. It always just puts a smile on my face. 7 p.m.: Catch a Clippers gameI'd either stick around downtown — maybe there would be a Dodger game going on — or make the long drive over to the Intuit Dome and catch a Los Angeles Clippers game. Their stadium is really impressive; I've been four or five times already this season, and you just walk in and [the cameras] scan your face. Then you can go to the little store and you just grab a popcorn and a soda and walk right out. And it scans your face [and charges your credit card]. At first I was like, 'Oh, my God! I am so famous that they recognized me!' And then I realized my face was up on the screen. And [the biometric ticketing and concessions] allows you to spend more time in your seat watching the game. This is a Lakers town, and I know that. But I bet on the Clippers maybe 15 years ago now, and I'm still riding with them. And I'll ride with them forever. I had season tickets for about eight years, and I loved it. But then I just was out of town so much working that I couldn't end up going to so many games. My [favorite] Clipper of all time would have to be Blake Griffin. When he joined, it turned the Clippers from a garbage basketball team into the Lob City days, which were the most fun. It was Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, and it was suddenly a show. And it was a better show than what the Lakers were doing at that time, so it was exciting to be a Clippers fan. Now we have Kawhi [Leonard] and James Harden, and it's a different type of show. And, honestly, it might be better basketball. But I miss those lobs. 9:30 p.m.: End the night where the career beganI think I would probably try to end my night at the Hollywood Improv comedy club. That was my first job when I moved to L.A. when I was just a kid. I would answer phones during the day, and at night, I would be the door guy. When I left — because my comedy and acting career was taking off — they told me I had been the worst door guy in what was then their 35-year history. I was 20, but I looked like I was 15. And my voice hadn't dropped yet. Anytime there were hecklers or someone was drunk and rowdy, instead of telling them to leave, I would have to go get someone else to tell them to leave. But working there really was my big break because I got to see the best comedians in the world every night. And then the manager, Reeta Piazza, told me I should start carrying a change of outfits in case a comic didn't show. I did, and when a comic was running late, they'd ask me if I could kill five or 10 minutes. Eventually I started to kind of garner attention, and I got [invited to become one of the New Faces of Comedy at] the Montreal Comedy Festival because they'd seen me there. And then I got the attention of Comedy Central, which led to me getting my show 'Workaholics.' [Before that,] we might try to squeeze in some sushi at Yamashiro. As kitschy as it is, it's got great views of the city, and the sushi is pretty good as well. 11 p.m.: Surf the Instagram algorithmI wish I would say that I just crack open the L.A. Times and get my news in or do anything useful [before bedtime], but I probably would just stare at Instagram and watch my algorithm feed me more garbage. [It's] a little embarrassing [because] it's all either babies giving their dads a little side eye or teenagers trying to fight their teachers, because my algorithm is all over the place.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
No Diamonds Here, but These Gemstones Still Shine
An early scene in the coming season of HBO's 'The Righteous Gemstones' showcases the newest product in a long and somewhat troubled line of consumer goods from the fictional first family of televangelism. These 'luxury' enclosures, called Prayer Pods, offer sanctuary from the din and prying eyes of public spaces, starting at $1 a minute. 'A tiny little, eensy, teensy, weensy bit of Christ when you need him the most,' says Jesse Gemstone, the oldest of the three Gemstone children. But sales of the pod tank when word gets out that nonbelievers are using them to meet less virtuous, self-gratifying needs. On Reddit, people start calling them 'squirt yurts.' The Prayer Pod is a signature plot device from the mind of Danny McBride, the 'Gemstones' creator, who also stars as Jesse, a sometimes lovable blowhard and a legend in his own mind. Like his brother and sister, with whom he constantly bickers over control of the Gemstone empire, Jesse has been handed immense wealth and privilege but somehow thinks he deserves more. Since the show debuted in the summer of 2019, McBride has developed Jesse and the sprawling Gemstone brood into some of the most outrageous satirical characters on television. On Sunday, the story arc of the Gemstones bends toward its conclusion with the premiere of the fourth and final season and a plot twist introducing Bradley Cooper as the newest relative. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
