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Danny McBride grew up wondering when Uncle Sam might come for him. It was the early ‘80s, a relatively peaceful period of U.S. military involvement. But McBride, a self-described “latchkey kid” whose parents worked most evenings and weekends, took in the world through the cable television movies he watched every day after school. “There were always movies about Vietnam on,” McBride tells me over the phone one mid-February morning. “Missing in Action, or Platoon,” he lists effortlessly, “Or Hamburger Hill, or Full Metal Jacket …” Alone in an empty house, in a historical slice of northwestern Virginia, fiction began to blur with real life. McBride lets out a joyful, relaxed laugh at the thought. “I would just think like, ‘Damn ’”—he’s full-on cackling now—‘“I wonder when the war's going to be that I have to go be in.’”

It’s an absurd and delightful memory of a formative period during the budding jokester’s life. All those movies? That’s how McBride learned about being a man, he tells me. Of course Danny McBride’s concept of masculinity came from watching Apocalypse Now, unsupervised, when he was seven years old. It’s a short distance between the primal madness of Capt. Willard and Col. Kurtz and the hilarious delusions of Kenny Powers.

In high school, McBride’s observations of masculinity continued on the soccer field. “Instead of running around with a hustle on the ball,” he recalls, “I would just sort of be looking around the other kids on my team and just sort of laughing or just fucking around.” Can’t you just picture it? Adolescent McBride at soccer practice in a mesh pinnie, missing a pass because he’s busy making a dick joke about the goalie. McBride admits he was terrible at sports. “That competitive edge was just not there,” he says. But the comedic instincts were, and, soon, he would have collaborators.

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McBride as Kenny Powers, a breakout comedic force of delusion.

McBride met the two other members of his production company, Roughhouse Productions, in college at North Carolina School of the Arts. He lived in the same dorm as the director and producer, David Gordon Green, and became fast friends with the writer and director, Jody Hill. They bonded over their small, southern hometowns. They all got a kick out of the jocks that ran the halls of their high schools. Together, this trio of goodhearted knuckleheads have pitched and sold three shows to HBO: 2009’s Eastbound & Down (about a dirtbag, ex-pro baseball pitcher); 2016’s miniseries Vice Principals (about … vice principals); and 2019’s The Righteous Gemstones (about a family of megachurch-owning evangelical millionaires), which just wrapped up its second season in February.

Though each show takes place in a separate universe, they all have one thing in common: a douchebag main character. McBride once referred to them as “fucked up Don Quixotes,” but Hill sees the inspiration for them in the people he and McBride knew from the rural south and, as he politely puts it when we speak, “didn’t like much.” Green, who grew up in Texas and knew his fair share of cowboys, expands on Hill’s point: “I think the exploration is these delusional men,” he tells me when we connect on his drive from Charleston, South Carolina—where he lives in the same neighborhood as Hill and McBride—to Savannah, Georgia, where he is filming Halloween Ends with Jamie Lee Curtis. “All of these characters see themselves as something they're not necessarily.”

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“Jesse Gemstone is seen as a religious man and also as a celebrity, and he feels there should be a certain amount of respect that comes with that,” says McBride.“Neil Gamby [from Vice Principals] has this authoritarian position, and he thinks that requires everyone in the world to listen to what he has to say and follow his commands.” As for Kenny Powers, “he sees himself as a God, and a superhero, and a king,” says Green, in a reference to the series finale of Eastbound & Down.

But look more closely and you’ll see that each one of McBride’s characters is more evolved than the last; less of a hairy ape, more of an upright man. Not necessarily smarter, just a smidge less self-destructive than the dude that came before him. This, McBride tells me, is by design—or at least, not entirely by accident. “You need to just write what you feel like you want to see and what feels appropriate for the times,” McBride says. “And then you let the cards fall where they may.”

The thing about the times is, though, they’re always changing.


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Kenny Powers was never meant to be likable—not even subversively—but the character found its fanbase all the same.

Eastbound & Down premiered during the honeymoon phase of President Obama’s first term. It was 2009. America had just elected its first Black president. White people declared racism over and everybody danced to Stevie Wonder. Life was good. “We had a blast making Eastbound,” recalls McBride. “It's like some of the best days of my life.” McBride hired a bunch of his college buddies to work as crew on the show’s set, which inevitably contributed to Eastbound & Down’s overall frat-house-after-pledge-night aesthetic.

The main character in Eastbound & Down, Kenny Powers, had his fair share of fun too, often at the expense of his on-again-off-again girlfriend, April, and his poor schmuck of a friend, Steve. Who can ever forget that day at the beach when Powers left Steve’s son, Toby, in a hole covered by a towel so that he could go surfing? Selfish scenes like this were a dime a dozen in Eastbound & Down, as were Powers’s notoriously crude, and painfully funny insults: “You smell like you've been chewing on buttholes all afternoon—diarrhea buttholes, diarrhea stinky buttholes. Get a toothbrush homes!"

McBride, Hill, and Green never intended Kenny Powers to be likable—not even in a subversive kind of way. “I would hate him If I actually had to spend any time with him,” says Hill, laughing. Nevertheless, fans flocked to Powers, embracing him as the cult favorite of television’s then-peaking anti-hero era. “More and more people went from despising this character to adoring this character,” says Green. He still sounds bemused more than a decade later. “And that in its own cultural evolution became hilarious to us.”

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Eastbound & Down showed its viewers that there are people out there like Kenny Powers, who, despite being assholes with a penchant for locker room talk, “can still get paid and laid,” says McBride. Looking back from his perch in the post-Obama era, McBride tells me he thinks Eastbound & Down might’ve been “a little bit ahead of where the discourse was going” in that sense. But at the time, they weren’t trying to be political. “It was just really fun to tap into those raw [emotions], and, in so many ways, a ridiculous portrait of masculinity,” says Green. It was McBride’s very own Apocalypse Now, a final flip of the bird to the soccer jocks before McBride grew up. As he says: “I was in my twenties when I wrote Eastbound & Down. I have two kids now. You see more of the world and the world changes.”


Comedy is all about timing, and in the case of McBride’s second comedy for HBO, the timing could not have been worse. Vice Principals is a pitch-black show about two, pissed-off white dudes and their resentment towards a more powerful Black woman. McBride and Hill wrote the series in its entirety in 2014 but it didn’t air until the summer of 2016, right around the same time a group of pissed off, Trump-loving white dudes participated in a violent protest over the removal of a Confederate monument. The show felt eerily on-subject, but McBride again insists this wasn’t his aim. “I really just wanted to try a buddy comedy,” he says in his spikey, southern drawl.

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Comedy is all about timing, and in the case of Vice Principals, the timing could not have been worse

Critics argued otherwise and pointed to the similar-seeming political resentments fueling the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the show’s two main characters, Neil Gamby and Lee Russell. “Witnessing a temper tantrum that’s nearly a hate crime is about as funny on TV as it is in the news,” wrote Willa Paskin in Slate. (The hate crime she is referring to occurs in the second episode, when Gamby and Russell burn their Black boss’s house to the ground.) In 2016, amidst a renewed racial reckoning brought on by the election of a more offensive version of Kenny Powers, the optics were awful. “Vice Principals whitewashes racially motivated arson,” wrote Lili Loofbourow in The Week. Still today, some of the dialogue from those early episodes is unnecessarily crude; there is nothing funny about two white men making fun of a Black woman’s spanks and saying she smells like “fucked buttholes”—no matter what year it is.

Jody Hill understood the critical consensus and took it in stride. “We shot all 18 episodes before that thing even came out,” he says. “And I knew where the story was going. So a lot of those first opinions where people would see the first three episodes and write something, it was like, ‘Yeah, we did this on purpose. And then you'll see later on how that works out.’” Vice Principals eventually morphs into a deeper and more meaningful show, and those that stuck around until the second season were rewarded for their commitment with some of the most prescient commentary on the Angry White Man to ever air on television. An allegory of the Reconstruction Era, in their quest to control North Jackson High School, Gamby and Goggins are portrayed as the losing Confederacy, and their efforts characterized as futile and infantile.

The evolution of Neil Gamby, especially in comparison to Kenny Powers, is an inclusive journey. Multiple people deliver tight, character-driven comedic performances in service of undoing Gamby’s abhorrent neuroses. “There's nothing I love more than showing the world somebody who's funny that they haven't seen before,” says McBride. In Vice Principals, that person is Edi Patterson. When we first meet her character, Ms. Abbott, she’s busy cutting Gamby down to size by calling him out for inviting himself on a school field trip. The comment throws Gamby off, forcing him into a puzzled corner, just like so many of the things Kenny Powers spat at April did to her. In Patterson, it’s clear McBride has met his comedic match.

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“I felt like there were fireworks going off in my soul,” recalls Patterson about the first time she met McBride. Patterson is from east Texas—a place she describes as “oil processing Texas” not to be confused with “oil Texas” which is further north in big cities like Dallas—and her accent turns every vowel into a tangy, multi-syllable affair. It was during her audition for Ms. Abbott and Patterson improvised her way through it. “I just figured, let’s let it rip a little bit.”

Let it rip, she did. Patterson blew the lid off the clingy girl trope she was asked to play and manifested a role for herself that was more animalistic than it was overbearing. Patterson credits McBride for her breakout performance. “I felt a creative permission from him to let it rip and to kind of run down the field as fast as I could.” McBride says the respect and admiration is mutual. “From day one, when she came onto set, I just couldn't get through takes with her. There's just something special and fucking unique and funny about her.”


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Edi Patterson, left, who first teamed-up with McBride in Vice Principals, is now a wrtier and star on The Righteous Gemstones.

“I've never been in that mindset like, 'Guys are funnier than girls and girls can't be funny,'” McBride tells me. At the same time, he says there was never a moment the Rough House Productions gang felt like they needed to go out and explicitly recruit a woman. It was fate then that Edi Patterson just happened to arrive right when McBride needed her the most—at the exact same time male anti-hero tv shows and bro comedies were falling out of fashion. With her spot in the writing room for The Righteous Gemstones, Patterson is the first female with such a gig in a McBride production.

"Having her [Edi Patterson] involved in the writer's room is inevitably a very valuable voice for not just her character, but the show in general,” confirms Green, “And having representation for female characters in the writer's room, I think is just, is awesome.”

Patterson’s character, Judy Gemstone, is just one of several important players in The Righteous Gemstones, and the ensemble cast is the reason The Righteous Gemstones is as good as it is. Green says he looked for “fearlessness” when it came time to cast The Gemstones. The actors in these roles have that and then some. Each one brings a set of idiosyncrasies that—for once—render McBride’s performance as eldest brother, Jesse Gemstone, one of the least important in the series.

There’s Cassidy Freeman’s polite but powerful performance of Jesse Gemstone’s gunslinging wife, Amber; Tony Cavalero’s sweet interpretation of the reformed kinky goth, Keefe; and Tim Baltz’s calm but confident take on Judy’s effeminate husband, BJ. He rollerblades, has a single diamond earring, and seems more at peace with his masculinity than any of Danny McBride’s other characters. “I think that we were realizing that, as you create television, the more people you have for the audience to invest in, the richer the show can be,” recalls McBride about taking an ensemble approach to The Righteous Gemstones.

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Danny McBride doesn’t live in Los Angeles anymore. A few years ago he moved his entire family to Charleston, South Carolina after falling in love with the low-country, coastal town while filming Vice Principals. Hill and Green packed up their families and moved too. The transition inevitably affected the way the gang views the world. “If you're a writer, I feel like it's good to live around the people who watch what you're doing as opposed to the people who hire you to do what you're doing,” McBride says.

Balancing those worlds, the Hollywood studio executives who pay his bills and the many Southerners who might see themselves in his characters, has become McBride’s life work. “We don't want to do the obvious reactionary readjustment to the way things unfold in the world,” says Green. But at the same time, they want their characters to evolve. “As writers, it's our duty to observe those changes and create something that's reflective of what people are like,” says McBride. It’s work that requires deft navigation—and discretion.

“I'm not a political person at all,” McBride tells me—one more time—towards the end of our conversation. “I feel my superpower is just being able to observe and see how people are. I see the world and like, what hurts people's feelings?” That may be so, but in today’s world, hurt feelings define American politics. McBride knows that, whether he wants to admit it or not. Why else would he include a scene in The Righteous Gemstones that explicitly mocks the Proud Boys movement? When asked about that scene in particular, Hill hesitates, “That stuff just bleeds out …” then slowly allows, “I mean, we watch the news just like everybody else.”