Latest news with #TheRighteousGemstones'
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
One Shot: The origin story behind ‘The Righteous Gemstones'' original sin
'The Righteous Gemstones' turns back the clock to the Civil War in its final season premiere to reveal the origin story of the televangelist family, with Bradley Cooper guest starring as Elijah Gemstone, a drifter turned charlatan preacher. 'I always had the idea that we would show a beginning of this connection to religion with this family,' says creator Danny McBride, who directed the episode. 'Prepped to within an inch of its life' in order to capture the period setting convincingly, the episode owes much to an Oscar-winning referent, 1989's 'Glory,' and to production designer Richard A. Wright, says cinematographer Paul Daley. Catapulting Eli down a new path is a deadly church robbery. Its visual storytelling is near-monochromatic, juxtaposing light and darkness. 'There's this idea of this false sense of holiness and that this guy doesn't belong here,' says McBride. 'We came from the idea that instead of him emerging from the shadows, he rises from a pew.' After stealing the priest's Bible and fabricating a letter to clear his name, Eli stands ominously over the dead body — an angelic glow bursting behind him. It's a moment where fortune, or in this case fate, favors the bold.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Righteous Gemstones' star performing in improv show at Charleston theater
CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – A star of HBO hit 'The Righteous Gemstones' is set to perform next month at a downtown Charleston theater. Edi Patterson, who plays Judy Gemstone, will improvise scenes in 'Doozy' based on audience suggestions alongside Dan O'Connor, Brandy Sullivan, and Greg Tavares at Theatre 99. If you're interested in attending the show, which will be held June 4 at 8 p.m., tickets are available online at the link below. The theater company on Meeting Street is known for its improv comedy shows on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Classes are available year-round. Guests should arrive 30 minutes before showtime as seating is first-come, first-served. There is no parking lot, but Charleston offers free street parking after 6 p.m. Nearby garages include the Charleston Place garage, Marion Square, and the Gaillard Auditorium. Theater 99 is at 280 Meeting Street above the Bicycle Shoppe. The entrance stairs are at the back of the building. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
San Francisco Chronicle
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Bobby Flay, Serena Williams and Green Day headline BottleRock Napa Valley 2025 culinary stage
Culinary heavyweights like TV food competition master Bobby Flay, 'Top Chef' host Kristen Kish, tennis legend Serena Williams and actress/singer Kate Hudson are among the stars set to appear at the BottleRock Napa Valley culinary stage. Known for bringing together celebrity chefs, musicians and sports figures, the 2025 Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage also plans to present festival performers including Green Day drummer Tré Cool as well as musicians Noah Kahan and Benson Boone throughout the Memorial Day weekend event from May 23-25. 'We've got a great cross section of talented chefs, musicians, world-class athletes, celebrities and engaging personalities ready to literally and figuratively mix it up,' said Dave Graham, partner at BottleRock Napa Valley, in a statement. 'Fans will surely experience some fun, crazy moments.' Well-known chefs like Andrew Zimmern, Antoni Porowski and Marcus Samuelsson, alongside celebrities such as comedian and 'The Righteous Gemstones' star Adam Devine, also top the bill. They'll share the stage with musicians like Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, R&B singer Bobby Brown, and rappers Chuck D, Flavor Flav and E-40. Other notable celebrities set to appear include San Francisco Niners George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk, and former San Francisco Giants players Evan Longoria and George Kontos. While BottleRock Culinary Stage veteran José Andrés, who launched the new cooking competition show "Yes Chef!" with Martha Stewart earlier this year, isn't on the list, other returning culinary stars include Brooke Williamson, Masaharu Morimoto, Trisha Yearwood, and Bryan and Michael Voltaggio, among others. Emmy Award-winning TV personality and KCBS 'Foodie Chap' Liam Mayclem will once again host each food demonstration, with music provided by Bay Area DJ Umami. BottleRock Napa Valley, which takes over the Napa Valley Expo, again promises to deliver a unique fusion of food, music and celebrity in the heart of downtown Napa. Headlined by Green Day, Justin Timberlake and Kahan, the three-day event will feature more than 75 musical acts spanning rock, pop, electronica and hip-hop. In addition to the headliners, BottleRock's musical stages will showcase an eclectic mix of artists, including Kaskade, Ice Cube, Rebelution, Sublime, Khruangbin, Public Enemy, Flo Rida and more. Single-day ticket prices start at $233 for general admission, $598 for VIP access and $864 for the exclusive VIP Viewing Suite.
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
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Saturday Night Live' Highlights: Quinta Brunson Puts on a Showstopper
'SNL 50' is nearing the end, with only two more episodes to go this season, but that doesn't mean it's time to turn things down quite yet. For her second round hosting at Studio 8H, Quinta Brunson pumped up the volume, kicking off the show with a musical monologue that featured both pop star Sabrina Carpenter and basketball phenom Dwayne Wade, then filling out each sketch with energy and dynamism. Not everything landed perfectly, with the writing of many of the live bits feeling like the staff are just going through the motions, but Brunson's ability to commit to each role and work seamlessly off the cast more than made up for it. It's been a while since a 'Saturday Night Live' monologue really stood out, particularly this season with so many return hosts effecting a been-there-done-that attitude, but between Jack Black's crowd work in his episode last month and Brunson's showstopping number topping this one, it's nice to see this section of the show milked for all it's worth. Brunson's singing may not be quite on par with Carpenter, but her enthusiasm and stage presence brought the whole piece together. More from IndieWire How 'The Righteous Gemstones' Costume Designs Drip for Christ 2025 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series Having kicked off her career doing BuzzFeed videos and 'A Black Lady Sketch Show,' it's clear that Brunson's comedy skills are best suited to the pre-taped format (though her talent for live work should not go unrecognized). One of the best pre-taped moments of last night (and all season) saw Brunson adopt an older look alongside the show's longest cast member, Kenan Thompson. Together they play an aging couple informing their children of their new side hustle, which is basically a version of OnlyFans, but just for senior citizens. Considering Brunson has mostly had to keep it clean on 'Abbott Elementary,' seeing her go so blue with her comedy and have so much fun doing it was a delight. Another pre-taped moment that garnered a good amount of chuckles was a faux-ad for a new clothing brand named 'Forever 31' (as opposed to the real life Forever 21). With most of the cast shifting into their early 30s, it was the perfect opportunity to highlight the alterations that occur to ones presentation/styling when moving on from their raucous 20s. The looks on display were all too familiar, making the joke even that much funnier for its sense of radical honesty. We love a pair of 'SNL' besties and Sarah Sherman and Bowen Yang might just top the list. Though they don't always end up in a sketch together, they are more often than not seen embracing during the goodnights of every show. When they do get to play off one another, as they did last night during Weekend Update, it's typically always a sight to behold. Playing to skeezy suburbanites likely from New Jersey or Long Island, Sherman and Yang worked off one another like a finely tuned orchestra, heaping praise upon the chain restaurant Applebees and bemoaning its recent bankruptcy. Come for the shared filled fishbowl drink and questionable pigtails and stache, stay for unavoidable kissing the two end up getting into. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
