Shea Whigham! The man is one of our great character actors. When he shows up on screen—whether in Perry Mason or Boardwalk Empire, Fargo or True Detective—you know you’re about to get a hell of a performance.
Which is why I found myself levitating when I turned on this season of The Righteous Gemstones, HBO’s funniest evangelical succession comedy, to find Whigham under about 50 layers of makeup playing the decrepit race car driver Dusty Daniels. In season three, the Gemstone siblings, Jesse (Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson), and Kelvin (Adam DeVine) are now running the show at their megachurch—much to the chagrin of longtime members, including Daniels. It’s Whigham’s first time back to the Danny McBride Cinematic Universe since Vice Principals, and a welcome return.
Because Whigham works overtime, across genres, you’ll also be seeing him this summer in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in the blockbuster espionage action series. When Whigham and I spoke, it was late at night in Rome, and he had just left the movie’s premiere. “It's incredible,” he said. “I'm still pinging pretty hard.”
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Shea Whigham: I wish. I've been very lucky with HBO, that's for sure. This one came up pretty out of the blue with Danny. He's probably one of my two or three oldest friends in Hollywood. I've known Danny forever. When this came up, I said, "Okay, wait, a 70-year-old … hang on a second here." It took about three plus hours every day to get into the makeup.
No, it started out pretty broad. I grew up down there in the south with NASCAR, so I knew all those guys. One of the greatest names ever in sports is Dick Trickle, NASCAR driver. Of course we had Earnhardt in mind. It was an amalgamation of some of the guys.
You got to look him up.
Oh, we have plenty to pull from. Dick and all those guys, the early guys, were smoking heaters, they were smoking heaters while they're changing tires and putting in gas. It was a whole different world back then. We draw from a lot of them down there. When I played Tip in All the Real Girls, or Ray in Vice Principals, we pulled from different guys, for sure.
He's as kind as anyone that you'll ever meet. What you see is what you get. He's never caught up in it. He's not off to the races because of how much notoriety that he's gaining. He's the same guy that I knew 20-something years ago. Danny's one of the smartest cats that you'll ever meet. I'm shocked that he writes, directs, stars, and produces it and that he hasn't won a ton of awards. He is that good. He’s going to allow me to create and we're going to build something. Ray in Vice Principals wasn't that way on the page. They let me really build Dusty into something. I love the creative process with Danny.
I'm a guy that's running after Tom, in many different countries, chasing after him. [Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie] really let me build that character. Danny and Tom are both very gracious, generous actors and bosses. They allow everyone to have their moment. When you go see Mission, everybody has a moment.
It's amazing, because they don't make films like this anymore. When you see the train, I had a buddy that came with me [to the premiere] asked, “Was that you really up on top of the train with Tom?” I said, “Yeah, that's us in Norway, going 65, 70 miles an hour on top of the speeding train." Everything is practical with these guys. And you know Tom does his own stuff, everything.
We went to Norway, Rome, Venice, Abu Dhabi, London. That's one of the coolest things, is the travel. In Rome, there wasn't a stunt driver. I was a little kid chasing after Tom in the streets, the Via Imperiali and landmarks. It's as good as it gets.
No, no, no, no, no. I would say … misunderstood a little bit. It’s no secret, Ethan Hunt is somewhat rogue in the way that he operates. My character starts out by-the-book. It's a very personal thing with he and I, that you'll see.
The jumping off of the ramp that we've seen in the behind the scenes. That was like nothing I've ever seen. We landed in Norway and the first thing, I think, was going to be that jump. I thought to myself, "There has to be a little bit of smoke and mirrors." You know what I mean? It's not true. He does it all. That was as harrowing as anything I've ever seen.
They just threw me right on it, man. With something that kind of had me anchored that looked like a piece of dental floss.
Yeah, the hair, you know where I got the hair? I was trying to figure out who Briggs is, and I stole it from my director, McQuarrie. He's got a great lid. I told him about a quarter of the way through. he's like, "Your hair." I said, "Yeah, yeah, I got it from you, man. I took it from you."
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Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
It gutted Matthew [Ryhs] and me. I was heartbroken, to be honest with you. I didn't know why they didn't at least let us go out with a two-hour movie or something just to kind of have a little bit of resolution. I don't know. We were heartbroken.
You know what I wanted? I was just speaking of the heartbreak of Perry Mason. Boardwalk Empire, I thought we had more stories to tell. I'd love to find another character or come back and play someone like Preacher Theriot in True Detective.
I'd say Boardwalk. I get Vice Principals in airports and stuff. Then, Fast and Furious a lot for, some reason.
John Cazale is the best for me. He's the guy that I continually go back to. I love the purity of his work. I love him. I love Gary Oldman now, in Slow Horses, but I love early Gary Oldman. I patterned a lot of my stuff after Gary Oldman. That was the kind of career I was like, “if I could even get close to that.”
For me, I'm constantly asking, “How do I stay hungry? How do I continue to try to better this thing?” I was telling somebody, they're like, "You want to do this forever?" And I said, "Yeah, I want to be like John Houston. I want to have an oxygen tank canister in my nose on a set, digging, trying to figure out the truth of the scene. And then kick it.”
Was that too much?
This interview has been edited and condensed.