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Danny McBride and his old friend David Gordon Green were sitting around the Charleston, South Carolina, office of Rough House Pictures one typical morning recently, talking about improvements they might make to the movie-going experience.
McBride doesn’t care much, he explained, for the modern-theater-that-serves-dinner trend. “I hate it, I can’t stand it,” he said. “I also don’t think it makes sense to combine booze with movies. You’re going to have to piss. Doesn’t alcohol make you want to get up and get loose? You don’t want to sit there, drink beer, and just be quiet. I would have no interest in going to see a movie and just pounding IPAs. Just fucking falling asleep.”
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Weed and movies, on the other hand? Those “go together fucking perfectly,” said McBride, who runs Rough House with Green and their film-school buddy Jody Hill. The friends had at some point kicked around the idea of opening a theater with a built-in dispensary. Green Screen, they’d planned to call it. “If I went to a theater, and it was like, ‘Here’s your popcorn and here’s fucking weed,’ I feel like that would be an awesome little combo right there,” McBride said. Green wondered: “Why did we not do anything with that?” Too busy, McBride replied.
We were sitting at a conference table on the second floor of a former white-collar office space in a posh, low-slung suburb of Charleston—on its face an unlikely seat for McBride’s steadily growing entertainment empire. McBride grew up in Virginia but came of professional age in Los Angeles, where over the span of 20 years he went from waiter and aspiring screenwriter to full-on television and movie star, and quite possibly the pound-for-pound funniest actor on the planet. But even when things were going exceptionally well, something about Hollywood sat uncomfortably with him. “There was a part of me that, every time I fucking would fly back to LA, I would just get a pit in my stomach when I would see that grid of all those fucking houses, and all those people there,” he told me. “I was just always on edge.”
So, in 2017, he and a handful of his closest collaborators, who also happen to be some of his closest friends, decided to move to South Carolina, where they had filmed plenty of TV and then returned together as serial vacationers. The plan was simple, but grand in ambition: to airlift the whole McBride creative brain trust, 8 or 10 whole families, to a pleasant and occasionally hard-partying city far from the spotlight.
It worked. Here, they’ve built a warmhearted, Southern comedy commune that runs on Lowcountry oysters, dick jokes, and large quantities of tequila. They spend their days, as they always have, making wildly funny movies and TV shows about deeply unpleasant people, riding an unmatched understanding of thwarted American masculinity to surprising wealth and influence. Only now they spend more weekends than they used to on boats. “We’re water people,” McBride told me. “Boats are fun, boats are awesome, we like that.”
McBride’s is a world where the sacred is inseparable from the profane—and where the profane is especially sacred. And the Rough House office is something like a temple to the art of male bullshit—the sort of place where highbrow discussions about story structure give way to riffing about hotbox-able movie theaters. A sign out front advertises Rough House’s fictitious services in private investigation and falconry (they’ve heard from would-be customers looking for help in both categories). Inside, decor is minimal but striking: Hanging on one bathroom wall is a framed pair of tighty-whities covered in (presumably fake) blood—a prop pulled from the set of The Righteous Gemstones, McBride’s HBO series about a family of venal televangelists. Over by the staircase, I caught a framed black-and-white photo of McBride with Ridley Scott, taken on the set of Alien: Covenant in 2016. The picture features the legendary director mid-gesture, his arms pulled up toward his face. One of McBride’s colleagues had affixed a ball-busting Post-it to the frame: “Danny, always remember to smell your hands. —Ridley”
When we met, McBride was busier than ever. He was finishing the scripts for the fourth season of Gemstones—his third series with HBO, after Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals. He was working on a collection of short stories he’d sold to Random House. And he was finalizing plans for Don Gato, the tequila brand he plans to launch this year. “I drink a lot of tequila, everyone in my circle drinks a lot of tequila, and so we’re like, ‘Let’s make one,’ ” he explained, matter-of-factly. (Nearly everyone in McBride’s world I spoke to mentioned his affinity for the spirit. “He’s good at tequila,” his Gemstones costar Edi Patterson told me.)
“I know everyone and their mother is doing that, which is kind of lame,” he noted. But the thing that would set Danny McBride’s tequila apart from George Clooney’s, or Kendall Jenner’s, or The Rock’s would be the same thing that had helped turn McBride into one of the most successful creators in modern Hollywood: the deeply Danny McBridean way he’d go about selling it. He and his friends, he explained, would soon travel to Guadalajara, Mexico, to shoot footage for an eventual ad campaign starring McBride as a Hunter S. Thompson–esque character bringing word of the mysterious Don Gato.
Whether in tequila or television, McBride is working these days the same way he always has, just on an increasingly larger canvas: with his closest friends, on material they wrote for themselves, madly one-upping each other in pursuit of something that would make them all laugh. But instead of self-financed student films, they are now bankrolled by the likes of HBO and Universal Pictures, if not the mighty Don Gato himself. “It’s just fun,” McBride said. “We don’t know the rules of that stuff. We’re all just going to go down there and just fuck around and shoot some crazy stuff and then chop it up and try to sell some tequila.” Perhaps the greatest measure of McBride’s talent is that it would be shocking if this seemingly makeshift plan didn’t work.
One afternoon, I met McBride at a restaurant he likes not far from his home, palms swaying in the windy hours before a storm. McBride and his friends first came to Charleston to shoot Vice Principals, which aired on HBO for two seasons beginning in 2016. They found themselves coming back again and again. His life here is bucolic: If in your mind’s eye you like to imagine that McBride gets around Charleston by way of souped-up golf cart, you will be happy to know that you are correct. His is black and festooned with stickers.
The vibe inside the restaurant was painfully charming: The host, it turned out, was also McBride’s son’s middle school French teacher. She showed us to what she called the VIP table, which was just the booth furthest from the door.
He eyed the menu. “Anything in particular that you’re dying to try over here?” he asked. I told him I was ready for the full Charleston. “Okay, let’s hook him up,” he told the waiter, and put us down for most of the menu: a dozen oysters, peel-and-eat shrimp, something called Lowcountry Frites. “Let’s get him some farro,” McBride continued. Also a pizza. “And then maybe let’s throw in that strozzapreti.”
These days, he tries not to deviate from his routine: up at five for some quiet time with his wife, Gia, watching the news and making fun of the local commercials. Then he piles his school-age kids into the golf cart, dropping his daughter off at school and grabbing a hot cocoa with his son before depositing him at the bus stop. He heads back home to get some writing done, and then pops into the office for anything requiring face time. He had spent this morning with Gia catching up on the latest season of The Crown. “Princess Di died, so it’s been a little bit of a dark, heavy morning,” he said.
It all seems so pleasant and dialed that it is hard to imagine McBride having ever done things differently. But when he first moved to Charleston, he told me, he was anxious it might not work out. “We kept our house in LA,” he said. “We were like, ‘You know what? We’ll keep this, because who knows?’ ”
He didn’t really need to worry. “After living here for two months, I sold the house,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I’m never going back there again.’ ”
Living in South Carolina, he explained, helped him solve some of the problems of TV-making that had bedeviled him in LA. For instance, on Gemstones, McBride—who serves as star, showrunner, and occasional director—is involved in all aspects of the production. “Every word on the show goes through me,” he said. “Every single thing.” In the pressure cooker of LA, he’d felt obligated to spend long nights endlessly revising scripts ahead of shooting. The method worked, but it took a toll. “You would get to the point where you were dreading coming into work, and then nothing ever happens,” he said.
In Charleston, he’s managed to find a mellower rhythm. “I’ll write and then I’ll be like, Man, my kids are off at three. I want to go home and see what’s going on at the house,” he said. “And even when we get stuck, we don’t stay till two in the morning. We fucking take the day off.” Amy Gravitt, an HBO executive who’s worked with McBride nearly his entire time with the network, attributed McBride’s continuing success to the move. “I just don’t think we would’ve gotten the same type of work out of him if he had stayed in Los Angeles,” she said. “I think it stifled him.”
Gemstones might be McBride’s most ambitious work yet: It’s about fathers, and sons, corporatized religion, and the hard-to-ignore sense that just about everything in modern America is broken, corrupt, or both. Naturally, McBride films the show in a defunct Sears attached to an old mall that is probably haunted. “When we’re there at nighttime, you feel like you’re in Dawn of the Dead or something,” he said. “You get to wander around this vacant mall on scooters and stuff.” They’ve fitted the place out with production offices and a few large-scale sets as well as a vintage Airstream trailer uniquely renovated to serve as a mobile editing suite. There were a few reasons for the Airstream. “You need something that you can move around,” he explained. Also: “We didn’t want a shitter in it. No one wants to sit in an editing trailer in the middle of the summer with an editor dropping a deuce in there.”
The setup in Charleston offers other benefits too: The lack of a direct flight from Los Angeles, McBride reasons, means that studio execs were less likely to show up and demand changes. Not that there’s much to complain about. Casey Bloys, the chairman and CEO of HBO (and an early champion of Eastbound) pointed out to me that Gemstones is the best watched of all three of McBride’s HBO series so far—and that McBride is a crucial stock in HBO’s comedic portfolio. “To generalize, in New York and LA they get what he’s doing,” Bloys told me. “But there’s also people from all over the country who also find him funny. And it’s a very hard thing to do and do well.”
Outside of work, McBride functions as the social chair of his group, his close friend and collaborator Walton Goggins explained. “Danny is the fulcrum, if you will, or the sun that everybody orbits around,” he said. McBride has taken it upon himself to plan boat trips, group dinners, mountain weekends. Not long ago a bunch of them went to see U2 at the Sphere.
It sounded, I told him, like a sequence from one of his old movies, but he insisted that nothing too wild had happened. “Now everybody’s rich, so we all just go there and gamble more money than you should and eat expensive steaks and stuff,” McBride said. “We were there with our wives. Everybody was well-behaved.” Still, he assured me: “I let it rip. I live a fun life. I don’t wear a suit and tie. I do what I want.” Seth Rogen vouched for both versions of his friend. “I actually find Danny to be very low-key,” he said. But, he noted, “He has his moments. I definitely remember a night in New Orleans where he wound up behind the counter at a diner at four in the morning making hash browns and serving people. So that happens from time to time.”
David Green explained that the Rough House way of working and playing stemmed from a crucial early lesson they’d learned while making Eastbound & Down. If you told the studio you could make a show for a reasonable amount of money and deliver it on schedule, and then you did those things, they’d more or less leave you alone. How you chose to spend your weekends was up to you—and the Rough House fellas had some specific, charter-a-booze-cruise ideas. “You realize,” Green said, “they don’t pay you less to have a good time.”
If McBride was reaching new heights personally and professionally, he told me over dinner, it was because living in Charleston had reframed some of his early assumptions about how the entertainment business had to work. “Moving here helped put it in perspective, and it makes me just really appreciate what we do. You’re like, Oh, this is a pretty fun career,” he said. “If you’re not having fun making it, if you’re not enjoying it, what’s the fucking point?”
As dinner wound down, we’d barely made a dent in our spread of Charleston specialties, and McBride tried to make me take the leftovers back to my hotel. We walked down to his golf cart, where I watched as he waited patiently in the restaurant driveway for crossing traffic. He tossed me a peace sign as he buzzed into the street and made for home.
If McBride has a comedic superpower, it is for dialogue—relentlessly filthy, surprisingly baroque, regionally accurate dialogue. Dialogue like: “I got two hard rules I live by, Pop: I don’t fuck with the devil and I never do tag teams with blood relatives.”
This is thanks in part to his unique media diet, David Green suggested. “He reads more literature every year than anyone I know, and he watches more reality TV than anyone I know. He reads prestigious, elegant literature from all history, and mythology, and all this shit. And then he watches the dumbest reality shows you’ve ever seen.”
But McBride’s facility for saying funny shit is also a meticulously honed skill. Beginning with Eastbound & Down, he explained, McBride began developing something like a secret comedic formula—a set of rules and tools for writing and performing some of the funniest stuff in the history of television.
One early idea was about who audiences could be persuaded to empathize with. His most famous character, the outrageous relief pitcher turned gym teacher Kenny Powers—intermittently racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, given to bouts of rage and drug use—is nonetheless a sympathetic figure, somehow. This obliterated old TV comedy norms, and was achieved by careful design. “When you have a protagonist in something, it’s like, Oh, they got to beat the bad guy. They got to rescue the princess. They got to mend the broken heart,” McBride said. “All of it feels sort of boring and cliché.” Early in his career, he explained, he learned that a simple change in perspective could create genuine excitement. “If the guy’s not admirable—if the guy’s the villain—then when he hits those clichéd hero moments, it starts to feel weird, and complicated, and unsure of what you’re rooting for.”
Another McBride rule: He tries to write dialogue in such a way that audiences can mimic it themselves. McBride’s shows have grown increasingly plot-heavy, but they’re still driven by breathtaking one-liners that coffee-break coworkers and fraternity brothers and golf buddies can’t help but quote to one another. Husbands and wives too. “When you can take that in your own personal life and then bullshit with your wife or whatever,” he said, is the sign of a good character. Being in Charleston has only helped with this. “There’s something about being out of the city where all the movies are made—it just feels a little bit more like you’re a spy,” he said. “You can really see what’s going on in the world and be able to take note and then inject it into what you’re trying to do.” Costumes can’t be ignored either. “The characters need to be defined enough that someone could dress up as that person for Halloween and other people would know who the fuck it was,” he said. “And that’s dumb. You don’t make a whole show about that. But in my brain it’s like, all of this is stuff that helps it latch onto people’s minds, and to want to get more of it, or want to think about it when they’re not watching it. It’s just little ways to make it last, I guess.”
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Another way to make it last is to show people something they haven’t seen before. Lately, that’s meant male nudity—and increasing amounts of it. “We kind of feel like it’s a section of cinema that has just not really been explored in mainstream work,” he said, taking on the voice of a haughty film professor. “You see, for years we’ve been given tits. We’ve rarely been given cock. Rarely.”
Recently, Green and Jody Hill have taken to surprising McBride on the set of The Righteous Gemstones. “I won’t know that there’s going to be a dick in it and I’ll get to the set and be like, ‘Green, why is the intimacy coordinator here?’ ” McBride said. “And he’s like, ‘Oh, this guy’s going to be nude in the background.’ It’s like, ‘You motherfucker. You’re going to get another one in!’ So sometimes we slip the dicks in just to make each other laugh, pretty much.”
There were, to be sure, disadvantages to being pioneers in the field of televised penis. McBride remembered one frantic call he got from a network suit concerned about a scene in which a character exposed himself on an airplane while seated next to a child. “We got a call from HBO that they’re like, ‘You can see the kid and the hard cock in the same shot. We can’t air that.’ And so we had to open the cut back up and find a tighter shot,” he recalled. “So these are the pitfalls of doing cock work and trying to break these barriers. You never had to worry about whether it was a kid in a frame with a titty, but you do have to worry about that when the cock’s out.”
You could say you’re held to a higher standard, I said.
“Yeah, we are,” he replied, laughing. “We are. We’re trying to break these walls down, and hopefully there can be a day where you could put a cock with anyone in any scene they have.”
McBride and his crew, in a fearless phase of seeking out new things to try, found a particularly lucrative opportunity with a recent detour into horror—rebooting the Halloween franchise with a trilogy of films, and then last year reviving The Exorcist. (Green directed, while McBride wore cowriter and producer hats.) These forays into the genre made more than a half-billion dollars worldwide.
That McBride had never written a horror movie didn’t deter him from insisting he be involved in what was initially going to be a Green project. “I kind of feel like you wouldn’t know how to do it unless you did it, you know what I mean?” he said. He and his group had been more or less making it up as they went from the very beginning. “I really think that doing Eastbound helped give us that confidence. And even just coming up from an independent-film background. You’re like, Win or lose, we’re going to go fucking do this.”
Early in his movie career, McBride occasionally chafed at corporate interference with his work. He recalled his harsh response to a cut of a trailer he’d been sent that he found lacking. “I replied-all with something, like, ‘This trailer makes me want to stick my head in a bucket of shit,’ ” he said, visibly embarrassed years later. Recently, he’s grown more comfortable with what it takes to sell a big studio film. McBride laughed while telling me about an email Green had sent to the Halloween marketing team actually soliciting their feedback. He wondered if there were any super-obvious, audience-titillating lines they ought to shoot, solely for their eventual inclusion in “a badass trailer”—the sort of groaner that they’d never put in the movie, but that would make someone catching the commercial on the couch at home sit up in curiosity. The marketing team, McBride explained, came back with this bit of genius: “Michael, you died.” McBride cackled, and then grew reflective. “But that showed a lot of growth, because our initial take was that those guys were all the enemy—that no one is getting what we’re doing.”
Lately, McBride has been thinking that it might be time to return to the big screen in a more forward-facing way himself. “I’m ready to get back into writing movies and doing movies, because it just feels like movies need help right now. They need all hands on deck to get in there and get people excited again,” he said. Compared to the grind of making TV, it would come as a break. “During COVID, we spit out five different screenplays,” he said. “For us, writing a screenplay is like nothing compared to writing a season of TV. It’s like, each season of Gemstones is the equivalent of three movies, you know? And the idea of writing one story that can have an ending and doesn’t have to just keep teasing what happens next, it seems like nothing. It’s like a breeze.”
But he also gave a sweeter, more surprising reason for wanting to get back to movies. When American Pie blew up the box office, he recalled, it gave him and his friends hope that they could do something similar. “Maybe it’s just my old-man view of the fucking industry, but that element, to me, feels like the most dangerous thing that the film industry has lost. When you don’t have examples of young people who make something against all odds, and then it goes out and makes fucking $100 million or breaks through in some extraordinary way, I think you need those examples to make the youth want to do this shit.”
It would be a mistake, he continued, for the movie business to leave behind young people. He’d been thinking about his son, and the sort of content that appealed to him. “To him, a YouTube dude is a million times cooler than any actor that he might come across. And I look at him like, He’s right, man. These fucking guys are making shit with their friends, making tons of money. And they have no bosses. People want to see a future where they get to ball, they get to have fun, and they get to do it their way. And I wonder if the film industry conveys that to people anymore.”
After two decades in the business, McBride had found himself somewhere new: Where he once carefully guarded his work from corporate intervention, he was now interested in finding ways to connect to bigger and bigger audiences. Yes, he was still making shows and movies about terrible people, still wringing laughs out of miserably awkward situations. But at this point in his career, and from his vantage point in Charleston, McBride was less interested in the button-pushing, sometimes alienating comedy that had felt so vital when he first started. “After a while, you’re like, Well, I know what it’s like to make something weird. It’s very easy to make something that people aren’t that into. It doesn’t really take much skill for that,” he said.
Instead, he was animated by a different challenge. “How do we do both?” he said. “How are we excited, and how do we make it so that they’ll be excited too?”
Sam Schube is the director of GQ SPORTS.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Inside Danny McBride’s Lowcountry Comedy Commune”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Roe Ethridge
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Leigh Ann Yandle
Tailoring by Liz Roth and Carolyn Kostopoulos
Prop styling by Carson Gloster
Food styling by Anna Hampton
Produced by Nicole Zaleski