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What Kobayashi is to eating large amounts of hot dogs, Danny McBride is to playing assholes: so adept at doing something unpleasant, he almost elevates it to the divine. The comedian has starred as asshole ex-baseball star Kenny Powers in Eastbound and Down and asshole middle school vice principal Neal Gamby in Vice Principals; in the upcoming series The Righteous Gemstones, his third show for HBO, he plays televangelist—and huge asshole—Jesse Gemstone.
The eldest son of a megachurch’s esteemed founder Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), Jesse spends the first season facing down a blackmail threat while jockeying for power with his younger brother and sister (played by Adam Devine and Edi Patterson, respectively). Frequent McBride collaborator Walton Goggins also shows up, playing his uncle Baby Billy (not an actual baby). Gemstones tells the story of a family and a church in flux, with your typical McBride flourishes: bombastic idiots behaving badly, plenty of juvenile jokes about genitals.
But Jesse is, McBride assured us, inherently different from his two previous HBO assholes. “Those other characters never got what they wanted and that's why they have such a chip on their shoulder,” he told GQ. “Jesse is someone who's very privileged, he has everything he could ever dream for and it's not who he is.” McBride himself was born into a church-going family in Atlanta, and talked to GQ about how that influenced the show, how he landed on Jesse’s distinctive look, and which one of his asshole characters would win in a fight.
GQ: I know you were raised Baptist. Tell me more about your early religious upbringing.
Danny McBride: Both my parents were really involved in the church and I have a lot of memories of being a kid and being dragged to church. Then when I was in sixth grade, my parents got divorced and my dad sort of ran out on us. So here was my mom who had given so much time to the church and now she's a single mom with two kids and a part-time job at a department store at the mall.
You'd think it'd be a time where the church would try to help her out. Instead we found the exact opposite thing—it was people whispering behind our family's back and just being judgmental on my mom for getting a divorce. It really bothered her a lot and she would continue to still take me and my sister to church, but she wouldn't come. She would just drop us off. After a few months of doing that, there was such a bad taste in our mouth about the whole thing that we just kind of stopped going. When I was a kid, in my head I was like, "Man, I don't know what the word for this is." I've figured out as an adult that it's hypocrisy.
I was barely paying attention, but I knew that what they were teaching us at church was to not act this way. It left a bad taste in my mouth about organized religion and how different people can use it to make themselves feel better about themselves.
How’d you end up writing your background into the show?
It really wasn't until I moved to Charleston, South Carolina about two years ago and started seeing all the churches and it brought me back to my childhood. It got me curious about, what is church like now? How is it different from when I was a kid and I went? That’s when I started reading about these megachurches and seeing how totally different church is now. And then the more I read about these different pastors, it just felt like it was a world that sort of would be an interesting place to set a story like this.
Like the Hillsong churches?
There are so many of them. In Hollywood you constantly see that storytelling has to evolve in order to keep pace with the audience. It’s interesting to see that something like church has to do the same thing. Churches have rock climbing walls and concerts and all this stuff and you're like, well yeah, of course because you're appealing to people who are my age now and my memory of church is that it's boring.
Some of the churches I would see would strip out religious symbols and stuff like the cross because they didn't want to offend people or turn them off. That also seems interesting to me, something getting so big that it has to strip away some of the essentials of what it's there for to be more palatable for people. I feel like a lot of the characters we explore do similar things and there's a similar irony there in some of the stuff we've explored.
The aesthetics of the show also reflect that. You have John Goodman’s character as the really old school televangelist. And then Adam Devine, he’s dressed like Justin Bieber.
He's the next generation. And I don't think it's a message that's just specific to religion. It's just about a world where we live now, where things grow and balloon so big. And with this family they set out to create this church and it's expanded so massively. But there comes a point where they have to look at themselves and see what got lost along the way.
Are you religious at all now?
I haven’t been to church since I was a kid. I have my own relationship with God. I have my own things I believe and I don't necessarily feel compelled to have to go to a place to experience that.
Looking back on it, I'm glad that I went to church as a kid. I think it instilled ethics in me that I have carried through my whole life. And I try to figure out ways to instill that in my kids as well. But the hypocrisy that went along with going there, it was a turn off to me.
For sure. Did you go to any of the megachurches while researching this?
I did go to a few megachurches and I talked to a few different pastors. My aunt is a minister in a big church. I don't think it's really a megachurch, but it's a pretty massive church in Atlanta. And so I did get a little behind the scenes on that and just sort of talking to them about what they think about the state of the business and all that.
Did they have anything surprising to say?
I asked them, "Well, how do you know whether a church is successful or not?" It’s all about the numbers of how many people they get and the numbers need to go up every year. And I was like, "Well, what happens if the numbers don't?" Well, you just replace who's leading the church.
I'd never thought about church as a business that way, but I'm sure it's the same rules that a Starbucks has to abide by. If you're going to show up, you need to figure out a way to get people to come and to have your numbers grow.
Obviously the three generations are three different demarcations of the megachurch’s eras. Jesse’s look in particular is so specific and I wanted to know, how’d you land on it—the sideburns and all that?
Jody Hill and myself wanted for a while to make a Dixie Mafia crime story and so I was always fascinated with these characters from the late sixties in Memphis. The style was sort of this Elvis-inspired kind of Southern look. So when [costume designer] Sarah [Trost] and I were coming up with the look for him, what we are pulling from is that Jesse thinks that he is a little bit of a gangster, a little bit of a tough ass.
The hair and stuff, I was trying to channel that late seventies, early eighties country rock star. It looks like Conway Twitty or just any of those super country celebrities back in the day.
You play a lot of assholes.
Mhmm.
How do you work to differentiate them from each other?
It's all about trying to set the table differently. There’s something different you're able to explore with that shade of asshole. Eastbound to me was an exploration of just ego and of what it takes to be a hero or what it takes to be a role model. Vice Principals is exploring leadership and what sort of values a leader should have and how far is too far to get what you believe is right.
This to me is about family and tradition. Those other characters never got what they wanted and that's why they have such a chip on their shoulder. Jesse is someone who's very privileged, he has everything he could ever dream for and it's not who he is. His parents have built this empire and he's there amongst it and he can just keep his mouth shut and collect a paycheck and live a good life. But ultimately he's struggling with the idea that this isn't who he is. He's duplicitous and leading this double life because he's not being honest with himself.
Between those three characters, who do you think would win in a fight?
Each of them would have their own abilities. I feel like Jesse would get people to fight for him. I think he could amass followers. Where Gamby has such insane rage that he could just kind of go adrenaline crazy and be indestructible. And Kenny Powers, who knows what he would bring to the fight. I think a lot of blood would be lost.
Tell me about getting John Goodman to star as your father.
That was a huge get for us. I would have never imagined in a million years when I was writing the pilot that we would be able to land him. He’s just one of those actors who I've always loved and he's always been able to do whatever he wants to do. He was doing TV when TV wasn't that cool and when actors had to decide whether they were TV actors or movie actors and he was able to do them both.
Edi and Adam, we would always constantly look to each other in between takes, like "this is crazy that we're in scenes with John Goodman." It was unreal.
Who are some of your favorite fictional preachers or fictional religious figures in general?
I don't know if I even have any favorites. When we were doing research for this show, I was reading a lot about the Bible and about the different characters in the Bible. And I read this one book called Empathy for the Devil, which was a book where every chapter was about a different villain from the Bible.
So much of what we see in movies and TV is so inspired by just the New Testament, the idea of Jesus rising up and assembling an army of unexpected allies and then being toppled, then the resurrection. It's so clear in all the stories that we see, that so many things follow that pattern. I think on some instinctual level, his relationship with him and the Apostles, it's like the ultimate outlaw gang.
If you had to join one megachurch now, after all the research you've done, which one seemed the most fun?
Joel Osteen seems like he's a kind man and he seems like he's got his stuff dialed in.
Old school. Well, congrats on the show. I just finished episodes five and six and now I have the “Misbehaving” song stuck in my head.
You know, Edi [Patterson] and myself wrote that song. Everyone on the set kept thinking "is this a real song?" They were looking it up on Pandora, Shazam or whatever. And it wouldn't come up. "Nah, this shit's from the dome. This is from us."
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