Danny McBride sends a love letter to the South with ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

Actor Danny McBride is ready to set the record straight on some of the misconceptions Hollywood has about the South. Born in Georgia, he attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem before eventually making his way to Hollywood.

McBride built a career as a writer, actor and producer with a sharp sense for the ridiculous side of masculinity and ambition. But he noticed that he was frequently offered a certain type of character — one based on stereotypes.

“Every role I was getting was just somebody named, like ‘Tater’ or ‘Dips***’ and he never had sleeves,” McBride says. “I was like, ‘This isn’t me, I can’t do this.’ … We grew up in a South [with] lots of different types of people and it wasn’t just one type of person.”

McBride’s latest show, which he co-created and stars in, is The Righteous Gemstones, a dark comedy about a family of rich Southern televangelists. Though they talk about salvation on TV, the Gemstone family is mired in dysfunction, greed, scandal and crime. Most of the series was filmed in and around Charleston, South Carolina, where McBride has carved out his own version of Hollywood’s South with his longtime collaborators, David Gordon Green and Jody Hill.

“It’s a love letter to where we grew up,” McBride says of the series, which just finished its fourth and final season. “Sometimes we might make fun of those stereotypes or embrace them, where it makes sense. … We were like, ‘If you’re going to make fun of the South, there’s more clever ways to do it than how it’s being done.’ “

Although the show centers on a family of televangelists, McBride says he didn’t want to make organized religion the butt of the jokes. As part of his research, he spoke to several pastors to learn the minutiae of how churches are run. Later, he heard back from one of them.

“There was one minister that I talked to and he was very open about … how things worked and I saw him actually just a few months ago out in town and he kind of came up and then whispered into my ear, ‘Nobody knows I’ve seen it, but you nailed it,’ ” McBride says.

Interview highlights

On how the concept for The Righteous Gemstones came to him

I had an idea I was working on called The King is Dead that was all about that summer when Elvis died, and it was going to be a crime story about the Dixie mafia, and I just I was playing around with it, but I never really found the right angle into it. …

After I moved to Charleston, South Carolina, which was in 2017, once I got here, I moved from Los Angeles, I just was seeing how many churches were around. And it just got me kind of thinking about when I was a kid, I used to go to church a lot. I was raised in a pretty religious family. And it kind of got my brain thinking about what church is like now. And so I started doing some digging around and kind of researching. That’s when I kind of came around to this idea of these megachurches and kind of noticing how they were starting to inhabit old box retail stores here in the South, and they were just kind of popping up everywhere. And the more I kind of dug around on it, the more it kind of seemed like, well maybe that Dixie Mafia story could unfold in a televangelist family. Maybe we could mash those two things together.

On the Gemstones mourning the loss of the matriarch

A lot of people don’t have experience with running a mega church or can identify with that. So for me, it suddenly became like, it’s about a family and it’s a family who’s suffered loss because I think that’s something that people can identify with, and I think when you find those things that are relatable, if you can hit those things earnestly, I think you can then put those characters in any world and people will take the ride.

On casting John Goodman as the family patriarch, Dr. Eli Gemstone

I grew up watching him. … When it was suggested going for him, for Eli, it, it just sort of like, ‘Yeah, right. Give me a break. Like John Goodman is going to come and work with us.’ And we sent him the script, and the next thing you know, I’m on the phone with him and we’re talking about it. And I really couldn’t believe it. And like looking back on it, it’s like, I don’t know who would have played that role but him. He grounds the whole world in such an important way that I think it would just turn the entire show into a Looney Tunes episode if you didn’t have someone that has his gravity and his abilities. He makes the enterprise feel like it’s real, like you can see that someone like him could build this empire. And I think if you did feel that, I think there’s something that would feel a lot less about the show.

On wrapping the show’s final season

When we got to that last day and you kind of like are moving through the coverage of what we’re shooting, and you start realizing like, ‘Oh God, that might be the last time that character’s on camera ever.’ And it all just started to hit everyone.

Danny McBride

I was so concerned with just finishing the show that I hadn’t taken much time just to stop and think about it being over. So when we got to that last day, and you kind of like are moving through the coverage of what we’re shooting, and you start realizing like, ‘Oh God, that might be the last time that character’s on camera ever.’ And it all just started to hit everyone. And we wrapped, I think, around three in the morning, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Everybody was bawling and it was wild. It was a roller coaster of emotions. …

And the next day, I went back to the stages. We overtook an old Sears, which Baby Billy preaches in in the first season, but that’s where all of our sets were built. Eli’s house is built there, the church lunch scenes, everything was in that Sears. So there was years and years worth of props and costumes, and just stacked. And I went there the next morning to kind of wander around. It was emotional. It was almost like someone had died, when you’re looking around at all these old things that like, there was so much thought put into like, designing things and now it’s all just like, being packaged up to be liquidated. I was like, I don’t need to come back here anymore. I got it, I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, I’m good.

On Kanye West (Ye) asking McBride if he’d play him in a biopic

It took me a while to believe that that was Kanye West when he called me. … It was a few years ago. He reached out and I guess he was a fan of some of the work I had done and said he wanted to come to meet me in Charleston, South Carolina, to talk about a project, and he came down here and we hung out for this awesome day and went out in a boat and talked about life. And he was telling me he was interested in doing a story about his life and wanted me to play him. And it was just sort of shocking and kind of like, ‘I’m flattered, but I don’t understand how it would 100% work, but let’s talk.’

I remember when we were on the phone call, he said there was, like, a fearlessness to it all, like, we were just kind of willing to kind of go there with things. And he felt like that’s what would have been needed. … It was very flattering, and it was a day that I will definitely not forget.

Ann Marie Baldonado and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Ciera Crawford adapted it for the web.