Danny McBride
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Date Posted:
January-23-2012 12:09
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Words: Chris Bell
High on a rooftop in Belfast city centre, a hooded figure sits, dressed in black. It’s past 1am. Behind him, three other figures watch silently, in awe. Suddenly: a bellow from below. A reveller exits a nearby nightspot, loudly berates a fellow clubber, and then starts singing. Now. Now is the time. The lone figure leans forward, slowly raises his hand and, with the practised swing of a baseball pitcher… throws an egg. A farm-fresh brown ovum that sails down, down… before popping loudly against the side of the carouser’s head. As he might say himself: f**k that noise.
The three figures behind cheer. They are actors James Franco, Justin Theroux and Natalie Portman. Laughing, they congratulate their leader. For four long months they’ve been resident in the Northern Ireland capital, filming stoner medieval comedy
Your Highness. For four long months they’ve been based in apartments overlooking one of the city’s busiest streets. And for four long months their punishing shoot schedule has been made all the harder by drunks bawling and brawling into the small hours of the morning. Until now. Until one man’s elliptical food-based deterrent.
But wait: there’s a commotion beneath them. From nowhere, four men have emerged from the club, and jumped the original egg-splattered reveller. The foursome swing into action, grabbing eggs from the box and pelting the small mob. Until, with a series of confused shouting, they run – leaving the reveller bruised, but okay.
“We just saved that guy’s life,” breathes James Franco. Their leader merely pulls back his hoodie, and stares into the middle distance. “Keeping the streets of Belfast safe,” he mutters, “one egg at a time.”
His name is Danny McBride.
MCBRIDES APLENTY
Not just any Danny McBride, either. Check the usual internet sites such as IMDb, and you’ll find several. There’s Danny McBride, the slick bebop singer/songwriter in the ’70s, who appeared in
Grease. Another D McBride is an actor, stuntman and screenwriter – a lantern-jawed, polished Hollywood type most famous for thumping supernatural beings in the
Underworld movies.
Except we’re not talking about either of those. In fact, the various Danny McBrides of Hollywood offer a decent metaphor for the route the movie industry has taken: from the musically talented, crooning Danny of “Old Hollywood”… to the clean-cut, perfect-chinned hero Danny of the ’80s and ’90s. And somewhere in the middle is the Danny we have now: the slack, randomly haired, potty-mouth who suddenly finds himself on a Belfastian rooftop with a soon-to-be-anointed Oscar winner and a family box of Grade A Large.
“When I joined the Screen Actors Guild, I was told I’d have to call myself Danny R. McBride,” he recalls. “But now I’ve got more film credits than the other guys, so I get to use Danny McBride, and they have to use their initials. Seems kinda mean: they were here first.”
And kinda strange, too. As, for their latest McBride incarnation, film bosses have replaced the typical Tinseltown “superman” with… well, one of us. It’s true: probably the most meteoric comedy star in the US right now is basically… us. Or, at least, our flabby, comatose, stoner mate. The 34-year-old is almost heroically fat. He has no discernible chin; a ratty goatee instantly joins his neck below his mouth. He waddles. His hair is lank and unmanageably bouffant. And his eyes bulge cartoonishly, red raw from what he calls a “lifetime of research” into stoner comedies.
In short: to Americans, he looks every inch a typical mulleted Bible Belt hick. In Australia, he looks like every anonymous middle manager you’ve ever met, making you think of nylon trousers and RTA counters.
But this everyman quality has transferred seamlessly to his roles. When he’s Cody, the pyrotechnics guy in
Tropic Thunder, shouting “Big-ass titties!” as he sets off another batch of C4 – that’s what we’d do. When he cameos as George Clooney’s future brother-in-law in
Up In The Air – nervous, sweating and having bought his fiancée a diamond literally the size of a salt grain – that’s us. And when he dons the greasy mullet of Kenny “F**king” Powers – the egomaniacal baseball pitcher-turned-teacher in
Eastbound & Down – that’s us.
Or rather, the guy we’d like to be when we’re hungover and feel like swearing at children.
That Hollywood’s McBride is now bringing home the bacon is a sign of how movie tastes have changed. His canon of movies has earned a fortune – over $2bn worldwide, if you take into account his role in
Kung Fu Panda 2. That’s an average gross of $68m: making him easily the most bankable stoner in the world. Seann William Scott must be livid.
BORN TO SLACK
But that’s now. Scroll back 15 years and, such was the everyman mundanity to McBride’s early career, you’ll wonder how it ever happened. Growing up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he’d shoot VHS films with his friends, the majority about shit blowing up.
“Most of them involved little clay figures or fireworks,” he recalls. “I watched them recently. They don’t hold up well…”
Putting off university due to the debt he’d have to rack up, he instead enrolled in a new film program at the University of North Carolina. To pay the bills, he waited tables and took shifts, worryingly, as a substitute teacher. “I was the worst ever,” he remembers. “I was called in to sub for a German class – I don’t speak German, so the teacher had left a video for the pupils to watch. But the tape didn’t work. So luckily I had some videos of my own in my bag. Specifically: I’d recorded a marathon of COPS, which I thought would be good for the kids to watch. And it was – they called me back several times.”
The tipping point happened just as he found a job shooting motion-control sequences for the History Channel. His old film-school buddy David Gordon Green called and asked if they should try to shoot a movie together. The result was
The Foot Fist Way: a martial arts tragi-comedy they shot over 17 days in 2006. They maxed out credit cards to pull together $100k, and used a cast of locals and a crew of School of the Arts students. But it nearly killed them: burned out on the whole thing, they completed a crappy rough cut and sent it to the Sundance Film Festival. And then went back to their lives.
But then people from Sundance called: they were in. And so for three weeks they worked around the clock to get an uncrappy cut, and soundtrack, finished in time. But then it got put back and screened at midnight, and they figured that was definitely it.
Except one man was in the audience: producer Judd Apatow, then-uncrowned comedy king of Hollywood. He loved it – and invited McBride down to the set of
Knocked Up, the Seth Rogen comedy they were filming at the time. McBride remembers it as one of the most surreal moments of his life. “They were sitting there quoting the film to me! It was a really, really surreal moment of like, ‘Shit, these guys not only have seen it, but they all like it.’”
After that, he was on the inside. In summer 2007, he got a supporting role in underrated comedy
Hot Rod and a lineless cameo in
Superbad – just as
The Foot Fist Way got a belated release. Suddenly, he was getting cult following and stole scene after scene in
Tropic Thunder and
Pineapple Express. “It’s one of those things,” he remembers, “where if I ever were to stop and think about what I was doing when I was stepping into the ring with some of these humongous hitters, I would’ve just shit my pants and gone home.”
Out of nowhere, McBride had star power. Along with his creative partner Jody Hill, they became good friends with Will Ferrell and his writing partner Adam McKay. And on the Monday after
Talladega Nights grossed $47m in its opening weekend, they arrived at HBO to pitch a new idea for a TV show. As McBride recalls: “I think we could have sneezed and those guys would have said we were funny, and they’d have picked the show up.”
FAST BALL
Its name was
Eastbound & Down: a genius slice of wincing, swaggering, profane self-delusion. “We love things like
The Office and
Spaced, and just a lot of British comedies in general – Alan Partridge, all that stuff,” says McBride.
“I thought they could just take their time with the comedy and do funny shit that wasn’t expected, and we wanted to play around with that.”
Of course, it stars McBride as Powers, the former big-league baseball pitcher turned major-league train wreck. But it was how far they pushed the envelope – with jokes about disabled kids, drug abuse and threesomes – that made it a huge hit within weeks. “Any scripts that we’ve written,” he says, “we’ve always put in some f**ked-up shit that we don’t really think would make it, in the hopes that that’s the obvious stuff they’ll pull out. But then we’d get the notes back, and HBO wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. It’d be just little things that were problems. Like, you can have a guy f**king blowing rails and driving his nephew to school, but if you make an AIDS joke then you’re out.” He smiles. “There’s more AIDS jokes in the second season, though. Gotta keep ’em on their toes!”
With a third season due to hit screens next year, McBride is on a formidable streak. Most recently, you might have seen him in his first headline release,
Your Highness, next to a Minotaur with an enormous dick (or, more memorably, Natalie Portman’s bottom in a medieval thong). However, as if to prove he’s living the Hollywood dream as we would, the plot for this medieval stoner comedy came from… a drunk bar conversation.
While at film school, McBride and his buddy David Gordon Green used to kill time between classes by getting stoned and playing “The Pitch Game”. Green would throw out a random title, and McBride would respond by pitching him back “f**kin’ retarded ideas” for movies. “He’d say something like
Face Of Danger,” remembers McBride, “I’d come up with
some weird story about Steve Danger, who’s a plastic surgeon and he solves mysteries.” Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Your Highness was
one of those – an idea that started with a bad pun, and ended up in Northern Ireland with a cast that featured not one but two 2011 Academy Award nominees.
MANCHILD MAGIC
Of course, if it needs to be said: Your Highness is not suited to all tastes. You could argue, if you were so inclined, that it’s a B-grade half-romp with crap British accents that, barring a couple of Justin Theroux moments, stinks worse than a 300-year-old codpiece. But if that’s your opinion, it’s probably because you made the mistake of watching it sober. And not, say, in Holland, when you can probably smoke something fun inside a cinema. Because that, obviously, is how McBride intended it to be seen. “We wanted it to feel big, to push the comedy, push the envelope,” he recalls, “and really approach it from this juvenile attitude of dick jokes, tits and marijuana.” He laughs. “All the shit that I wanted to see in a movie when I was 12 years old, basically.”
And that is the McBride ethos, in short: he writes for his 12-year-old self. “I’ve been in movies that were made to appeal to everyone, and sometimes they appealed to no-one,” McBride says. “It’s just more interesting to us to make the f**king weird, crazy movies that maybe some people go see. If you don’t like the Minotaur dick, you’re not gonna like our movie, and we’re okay with that.”
If you do “like the Minotaur dick”, worth tracking down, literally right
now, are his current TV ads – where Kenny Powers has been made the unlikely CEO of K-Swiss shoes. Otherwise he’s in 30 Minutes Or Less, a bank-heist comedy with Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari that is due out on DVD early next year. There’s also a rumoured upcoming role in the stalled Todd Phillips movie
The Chadster (simply described as, “What if Kenny Powers was in Wedding Crashers?”).
In addition, he’s in the process of turning a doco about bare-knuckle boxing into a show for HBO called
Knuckles. He’ll be in Seth Rogen’s directorial debut
The Apocalypse, co-starring with Jonah Hill and his ol’ mate James Franco in the end-of-the-world action-comedy. Oh, and there’s
Bullies, based on a McBride idea, about two brothers who have been intimidating people for years but finally get their comeuppance.
Busy, then. But as McBride himself says, now is the time for him to try out different kinds of roles. “If I get another script where I blow something up and I don’t have sleeves, I’ll kill somebody,” he says.
Makes you wonder, in fact, about all those other Danny McBrides that no-one now remembers. But there’s actually been contact with original crooner Danny McBride. “I had a phone-call conversation with him,” he recalls, smiling. “He told me that the town wasn’t big enough for the both of us.”
Series two of Eastbound & Down
, and Your Highness
, are out on DVD and Blu-ray now. 30 Minutes Or Less
will be out February 22