Danny McBride Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

- It was a very self-indulgent movie for us,

we were like making an R-rated movie for 13 year olds.

- Thadeous, your feet are bare.

Put your boots on.

- They're filthy, I'm having them exfoliated.

- [Fabious] No time for exfoliation.

- I haven't showed it to my kids yet,

but I've heard that it plays very well still

with 13 year olds, so my son has one more year to go,

then he can join the club.

[upbeat music]

"Tropic Thunder".

[upbeat music]

Honestly, it only had been a year

since I'd even been on a real movie set.

Like everything I had done

was just sort of like with friends.

And so that was like movie star camp,

I mean it's on a, this movie that's massive,

that there's a million actors I had seen,

you know, and had watched and had never met.

So it just was sort of like trying to stay alive

and feel like I could hold my own

with all of these like super talented, successful people.

And, yeah, that was like probably the most insane time

I've had on anything.

I mean we were in, you know,

to go from like waiting tables a year earlier

and then the next year I'm, you know,

in Kauai with Stiller and, you know, Robert Downey Jr.,

and Jack Black, and all these guys.

It was mind blowing.

- Hey, what's the dealy, dude?

Are we gonna blow this tree line or what?

Tuck Tuck And Kim got the blue balls here,

I'm gonna let him squirt if we're a go.

- [Dieter] Play it through, still rolling.

- Dieter, can you hear me?

That's C-four, dip shit, put that back.

- A lot of these like effects guys too,

when you meet 'em on the set,

like they do have personalities and they,

so you know, I would watch the guys

that I had been around with in this last year

and just took cues and notes from some of them.

The opening scene of that movie,

it took like almost three weeks to shoot.

So for like three weeks I would sit up in this tower

and like, you know, watch everything that was happening,

not sure if they were gonna get to my stuff that day or not.

- Dieter, these jets are about to crest this ridge line,

I got about 200 pounds of shit your pants,

I need to know if we're ready to go.

- And then meanwhile, Ben Stiller,

his character in that scene has no arms,

his arms have been blown off.

So he's like directing, you know, 500 people

and incoming helicopters that are exploding

and he has like no arms.

He's like screaming to move things here, take things there.

Even just the way he would handle the studio

was pretty funny, it's like, you know,

they would get dailies back each day

and I remember the studio would like give him notes like,

"We need more wide shots."

Or, "This needs to be funnier, it's too dark."

Ben would just take those notes

and then give them to Bill Hader's character

to just say in the movie to be mocked and ridiculed.

And then I think the notes slowed down after that, yeah.

- [Dieter] Cut-

- That's the signal.

- [Dieter] Cut.

- Go, go, go, go!

- Tits.

[planes whooshing]

- I remember I had like an earwig in

when I was sitting up that tower,

'cause if they had a cell,

any direction or anything to me,

so I could know what's going on.

And I guess during one of the takes,

they had like left Downey's like mic on,

and so I'm sitting up there and I'm like,

"Oh shit, I can hear what he's saying."

And he's like talking to people,

and he was in character the whole time,

and then I even like watched him like

walk back to his trailer and saw it from down there

and he was talking to himself.

- [Cody] Here they come!

- No.

- Stop tailgating me, you pasty tea bag.

Can I make a pee pee?

- "I'm gonna go drain the snake, I'm gonna drain the snake."

He was like made up a song about

how he was gonna go piss in character,

for no one else's benefit except for his own.

[upbeat music]

"This Is The End".

[upbeat music]

- Krumholtz is dead, Michael Cera's dead.

- Yeah, so Michael Cera's gone, it's not a total loss, huh?

[Danny laughing]

- [Jay] Jesus, Danny.

- Michael Cera's dead.

- It's not like that.

- It's not funny, man.

- It seemed like it was going to be

a lot of fun in "This Is The End".

I mean, the concept of it seemed awesome,

and once again it was like taking a comedy

and then mixing it with a bigger genre, you know,

which to me just felt like it it could be a lot of fun,

and maybe it would break through.

Jonathan Watson was the AD, the assistant director,

on that movie and he's been the AD on all of like,

"Eastbound" and "Vice Principals",

and he's directed episodes of "Gemstones",

we've worked with him a lot,

and Seth and Evan have as well.

And I remember he called me before I got there,

and was like, "Ooh, you better come prepared."

"They are going hard at each other."

[Danny laughing]

And so you kinda knew what the atmosphere was gonna be,

that it was like, oh, everyone, nothing's off the table,

everybody's going hard at each other,

it was kinda fun though.

- Y'all cool?

- That's Channing Tatum.

That's Channing Tatum dude, what the fuck?

- Chanting fucking Tatum,

I found him wandering on the freeway, I collected him,

made him my bitch.

- I had that very memorable scene with Channing Tatum,

and that was the very first time I met him,

is when we filmed that,

I was like in my trailer sort of like

going over my lines with like a skull on my head,

like all in blood,

and then Channing I think came running into my trailer

in like, you know, football pads or whatever he was wearing

or not wearing in that scene and tackled me.

And so that was when I first met him, and I was like,

"Okay, we're we'll get along, he'll be fine."

"So this will be easy enough."

[Danny laughing]

- Danny, we're friends, you can't eat us.

- I'd love to catch up but we're fucking starving.

So, let's eat!

[upbeat music]

- [Danny] "The Foot Fist Way".

[upbeat music]

- Let's go over the plan real quick, okay?

You're gonna start things off with your little floor pad,

get everybody hooked,

and I'm gonna step up and seal the deal.

- Who was Fred Simmons inspired by?

You know, I think he was kind of a mashup of just like,

you know, types of dudes that Jody and I

had maybe like been around growing up in the south.

You know Jody, is actually a black belt in taekwondo,

he had his own karate school in high school,

so he had definitely been around these types of people

and I took karate for a good part of my youth.

I think when I was like 12 years old,

I was kicking so much ass that my teacher put me in the,

my sensei put me in the advanced class

and so then I would just go to to to karate

and just get my ass kicked by like 16 and 17 year olds.

So after about a month of that I quit karate

and I put those days behind me,

and then, you know, when when Jody had this idea

and we were kind of like thinking about what to do,

it was kind of fun to be able to tap back in

to some of those personalities,

or egos that, you know, even stuck out to us

even being that young.

- You guys ever had sex?

[door handle clicking]

- Ah.

[door thudding]

Y'all getting to know Mike pretty good back here?

Why don't you go ahead and buckle up?

- No thank you.

- Okay, you guys buckle up.

- We shot that movie on on Super 16, you know,

it wasn't on digital, it was on film,

so like every frame counted, every take mattered.

We only had one camera, you couldn't play anything back,

and so you were really trying

to capture something very spontaneous.

And at that time period, you know,

we didn't really know a lot of actors,

we didn't know any actors, really,

we didn't have a lot of exposure to the industry

and there was something exciting about taking kids

who didn't know anything about acting either

and just kind of seeing what people did naturally.

And, you know, we auditioned

and went through the same process that any movie would,

and we're kind of looking for kids

that were more like personalities,

as opposed to like trying to be a character.

- Will you ever betray me, Julio?

- No, sir.

- I know you won't, because you're loyal.

You're one of my allies.

Now why aren't you out there teaching class

like I asked you to?

- They were able to express themselves

and kind of be a character in their natural personality,

and so that was sort of what we leaned into.

It was all just sort of a labor of love and pieced together,

and everyone just sort of brought as much of their A game,

or tried to learn how to form an A game, I guess,

while we made it.

- I will never misuse taekwondo.

I will be a champion of freedom and justice.

I will always be righteous

and help build a more peaceful world.

- It got to Sundance, so Jody and I instantly thought like,

"We've done it, we made it."

Like I think Jody actually went back into his job

and like told everyone to fuck off,

that he was like quitting and it was done.

And then we got to Sundance

and I think it premiered at like midnight,

and you know, we're all in this theater,

our parents are there, everyone involved,

everyone's excited to see this thing.

And about 15 minutes into the movie,

like half the theater gets up and leaves

and we're like, "Oh God, what does that mean?"

"Is it that bad?"

And we got home and were hopeful

that it would like find somebody

who could do something with it,

and then that's when we got a call

that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay were interested in it,

that they had just started this company, Gary Sanchez,

and they were looking to acquire this as like

one of their first releases.

And so I think it sort of like, you know,

we had suffered this little blow to our egos,

then instantly we were filled with our egos again.

It was like, "Yes, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay want this,"

"we are as awesome as we think we are."

[upbeat music]

"Eastbound and Down".

[upbeat music]

- [Kenny Powers] I'm the man who has the ball,

I'm the man who can throw it faster than fuck.

So that is why I am better than everyone in the world.

Kiss my ass and suck my dick, everyone.

- [Speaker] You've reached the end of cassette number-

- We shot "The Foot Fist Way" in basically,

I think it was almost like 17 days, you know?

And so we had never written anything like that before,

with that sort of formula where you were

sort of challenging the audience to like the main character

and that was like part of what the story was.

And I think we had such a good time doing that,

that we just wanted to kind of do it again.

But we didn't want want to just go make another movie,

it felt like if we did another movie in 90 minutes,

the story would inevitably have the same sort of beats

that "Foot Fist" had.

So the idea of like opening that character up

and figuring out how they would operate

in something a little bit longer,

that was kind of where it came from,

is we wanted to kinda do what we were doing with "Foot Fist"

but kinda put it on a different canvas.

And so that was why we kinda made him be around kids,

it was all just sort of elements of things

that we enjoyed doing on "Foot Fist".

And I think as we started cracking the character,

we realized that the show was like bigger

than just a substitute teacher, you know?

And that's when we kind of got really ambitious.

I think originally we even were gonna call the show like

"Physical Education",

it was just gonna be about a gym teacher.

- I'm Kenny Powers, I'm gonna be your new PE teacher

'till Coach Booth's back is fixed.

Yeah, I'm famous, la-de-dah, big fucking deal.

- The more we started to dissect Kenny

and kinda figure out where he came from

and what he was capable of and all the bad stuff he'd done,

it just made us feel like the school

was just one stop on this journey,

that his whole story wasn't about being a PE teacher,

and so, we didn't really find that out though

until we started writing the show.

- [April] Well, look at that.

- Mhm.

- That is Toby,

a Sony.

- Oh.

- Sony's a Japanese corporation, April,

it's PS3, it's a PlayStation.

- What an appropriate gift for a baby.

- Every season of that show was a blast,

I mean it really sort of marked us growing up, you know,

like when we sold "Eastbound", you know,

all of us were just like, we were all pretty young,

no one was married, no one had kids.

Like we were all just

couldn't really believe it was happening.

And then every season we'd come back,

somebody else was married, somebody else had a kid,

everyone started going out less and less.

I don't know, we kind of like went on Kenny's journey,

a little bit, of self-discovery and growth.

So for each of them, they, yeah,

there was something different.

I think the season in Puerto Rico, the second season,

was probably the wildest time we had filming anything.

I mean it was pretty insane.

- Honestly, I can't even believe you would look at me

and the word gringo would even come to mind.

- The rules were kind of like,

even just shooting down in Puerto Rico,

it was all different than

what we had experienced back in North Carolina,

it was kind of wild.

- Who am I speaking to here?

- Ashley Schaeffer, Ashley Schaeffer BMW.

- Oh-

- Damn fine to meet you.

- I take it you own this place.

- I sure do, that's why my name's on the goddamn building.

- I thought Ashley Schaeffer was gonna be a woman.

[Ashley laughing]

- I love women, I take that as a compliment.

Woo.

- Take it as you will.

- And all the stuff with Will Ferrell was always a blast,

like that stuff was always just like

you were on another planet,

that stuff was so much fun.

I think when Kenny Powers shows up to Shane's funeral,

with the boombox, and plays music,

I can just remember hiding behind the tree

getting ready to do it,

and just that fact that we were in a real cemetery

and it was, people really were like graveside.

It really, just the weight of how lame this was,

of what Kenny was doing, really was making me laugh,

it was a lot of fun.

[upbeat music]

"Hot Rod".

[upbeat music]

[hands slapping] [Rico grunting]

- And that is how it's done.

- After Will and Adam picked up "The Foot Fist Way",

the DVD of it started making its way like around Hollywood.

We started getting calls from just different people

who were watching it, and wanted to meet.

And Sandberg and Akiva and Jorma,

I guess they had seen it too.

They reached out to me and I put myself on tape

and instantly since I met those guys I just like

instantly loved them and I loved that they were buddies

and they were creating something together

and had been working together, and it reminded me of like

what I was trying to do with my group of friends.

And yeah, after meeting 'em I just really hoped

that I would get cast in it,

'cause I just wanted to get to know all them better.

I just, I admired what they were up to,

and they just felt like they were kindred spirits.

- Is everything ready?

- Now?

- No, no, no, no, not now-

- Blow it now.

[bomb booming]

[crowd screaming]

[rubble clanging]

- They weren't making comedies

at the expense of any of the filmmaking.

They were inspired by big movies,

and they were like trying to take what they liked about that

and then inject it into their comedy,

which I felt like was fun.

- One of you is getting your dick hole smashed.

[kick thudding]

[punch thwacking]

- Oh!

- I'm freaking pumped!

I've been drinking green tea all goddamn day.

[cone thudding]

- That was improvised.

I think in the script was I just get out of the car

and then give him a beat down.

And so everything in there just sort of,

I was just channeling the demon.

So drinking green tea, going to church.

- Oh, I go to church every goddamn Sunday.

- Stealing his hat.

- This is my hat now.

This is totally my hat.

- All of that stuff was just straight from the dome.

[upbeat music]

"Pineapple Express".

[upbeat music]

- I'm gonna flex and bust outta here.

[Red groaning]

- [Saul] Trapped.

- It's not happening, Red.

- Okay, all right, okay I'll talk.

- Seth sat with me a lot during that time,

and we would just chat and talk about life and, you know,

yeah, it was a lot of fun, that whole shoot was a blast.

- Woo!

- High five, seriously, I know this sounds weird,

but can we be best friends, just us, for real?

- [Dale] I think we should all be best friends.

- We should be.

- You guys are my best friends-

- Seriously, man.

- [Red] We shared a moment.

- After they saw "Foot Fist Way",

that was just one of the next things they were working on.

So they had asked if I'd be interested in, you know,

playing the role of Red, and I think because those guys were

sort of getting to know my crew and I,

that's why they decided to give Green a look.

You know, I told him that David Green's stuff in film school

was actually like really funny, but ever since he graduated

all of his stuff had a definite like art house flair,

but that he definitely has a wicked sense of humor

and no one had like looked to him to tap into that yet.

And I think that intrigued those guys,

and yeah, when they met with David,

I think they just got excited about the idea

of like handing something like that to him

and see what he would do with it.

[door thudding]

- You're gonna break the door, are you gonna pay for it?

[door thudding]

[sink clanging]

- [Dale] Oh!

- Ow!

Ow, fuck.

- No, that fight scene was crazy, you know,

we were going for it, and so everybody got injured.

I think like Seth like broke his hand,

or his finger, or something,

and Franco had split his forehead open.

Like that's why he has that bandana for most of the movie,

sweatbands, because he had actually split his forehead open

and he had a big scar there, so they put that there.

And then, not to be left out, when I get hit with the bong

in the back of the head, that definitely split open my skull

and I had a concussion and filmed for the rest of the day,

and knew all my lines still, even with my head split open.

- You okay, man?

Look, I'll get you another bong, all right?

- It's my cat's birthday today.

- [Interviewer] Any word on the

potential sequel for that one?

- I would go back into that in a heartbeat,

that was a lot of fun, but I don't know,

feels like maybe the time has passed, we'll see.

[upbeat music]

"Your Highness".

[upbeat music]

- It is finally time for you to become a man,

you must journey with your brother to rescue his bride.

- Father, you can't be serious.

If you want me to go onto a quest,

then let's start with something easy like boiling a chicken

or beating off in front of a Pegasus, elementary things.

- Ben and I had come up with that idea back in college.

It was like a type of movie

that we feel like we hadn't seen before,

and I think we were kind of at that point in our careers

when we were just getting going, we were like,

"Well, what kind of stuff do we wanna make?"

We weren't really looking to make

what other people were making,

we were kind of looking for holes in the atmosphere of like,

"Well when I was a kid I liked 'Time Bandits',"

"there's nothing that's the equivalent of that now."

And we were just trying to find those touchstones

of maybe what people now might miss or might wanna see.

We talked Universal into buying this pitch off of us

for "Your Highness", we wrote the script,

and it instantly became one of those things

where like our brains didn't really

understand movies of that size,

and like we have all this crazy stuff written in there

and then the reality of like, "You can make it,"

"but you have this much money to make it."

And it was still a lot of money,

it was more money than we ever had

played around with before.

At that point, David was the one who had the most experience

when it came to dealing with studios and finishing movies,

so it like made sense that he would come on

and try to lead that.

And then, yeah, I mean it was a very

self-indulgent movie for us, we were,

[Danny laughing]

we were like making an R-rated movie for 13 year olds,

is what we would always like say.

Those seemed to be the sweet spots

of the movies we liked when we were kids,

and yeah, it was nuts, it was, the whole thing was,

that they let us make a movie that weird.

We shot it in Belfast, so we all like lived there for like,

it was almost like six to eight months.

And I even remember like that part of the deal with it,

it was like that we would have like bad British accents,

but then even like,

that sounded funny every time we'd pitch it,

but then came like the first day of filming

when you're looking at this all British crew

and they don't know who you are

and they're like wondering what they're making

and then you start sort of like mocking their accents

and it was just like, "Oh, what have we signed up for?"

"What is this?"

- Everyone in the kingdom wants to suck your dick,

no one wants to suck mine.

- That was kind of the whole run,

the whole thing was always like,

every day we'd like roll up on set

and there'd be like a puppet, you know,

trying to molest James Franco

and we're just looking at each other like,

"What did we decide to do with all this money?"

"What are we doing?"

- Come, come, give me kisses.

[dramatic music]

[Wise Wizard smooching]

Mm.

- Kiss him.

- Fuck no.

- Pretty please.

- Kiss it on the mouth.

[upbeat music]

- [Danny] "Vice Principals".

[upbeat music]

- Listen here you,

come tomorrow there's a brand new principal in town,

and his name is Neal Gamby,

and those who wanna be catty little bitches,

well they can kiss their fucking jobs goodbye,

that is a Gamby promise.

- With "Vice Principals", sort of the idea

after coming off of "Eastbound", you know,

we loved the idea of working in TV,

and we loved the idea that you could

like stretch the story out and hit different markers

than what you could hit like in a 90 minute story.

But then how we sort of made "Eastbound",

it was sort of so centered around Kenny and his story

that we really wanted to like open it up

and we wanted to explore the idea of like a buddy comedy.

So even when we wrote that script, I wasn't sure

which of those two characters I was gonna play.

I kind of felt like if I kept it gray,

I would ensure that both of the characters

were like written well.

If I wanted to like make the mark be

that I would play either one of them,

I would want to be excited enough about that.

So I think with it we kind of formed those characters

based off each other, it was sort of like

two different people having like two different views

about the way the world works,

and how you go about getting the things you need,

and what's important to each of them.

And so it became just kind of very easy to create 'em,

you would get into scenes where there was

some sort of moral dilemma and it was,

you kind of instantly knew how each one would react to it.

And so I think he kind of sprung as being like

part of a twin, I guess.

- We ain't fucking friends, okay?

This is business.

- Friends, I'm not tryna be your friend.

- Out here tryna make a fucking friend,

we about to do a mission.

- You're the one tryna make friends the most.

- I love "Vice Principals",

and had an absolute blast making that.

And it was awesome, really, just because

that's where I got to really meet Walton and hang with him,

become buds with him.

And, you know, he's just one of those actors

that I enjoy working with so much.

I mean, we tend to like the dramatic actors

who have so much talent but are like, are totally fine

with like making a fool of themselves at the same time.

That combo works well with us, and Walton is that same way.

Like I love trying to come up with meaty material for him

and watch what he'll do with it,

and it will always blow any sort of expectation that we had.

And yeah, he's just, he's a champ, I love working with him.

- [Bill] Charlestown had slaves.

- Well I'm sorry, but I don't believe in that.

- You don't have to believe in it,

it doesn't change the fact that slavery happened.

- Bill, why are you arguing with me?

I'm saying that slavery is wrong, all right?

There's no reason for you to be arguing with that.

- I'm, that's, I'm not arguing with that.

- Look, don't make the whole field about yourself,

let's keep moving guys, come on.

- "Vice Principals" is what brought us to Charleston

for the very first time.

We had shot "Eastbound" in Wilmington, North Carolina,

and all of us are from the South,

so we always enjoyed like leaving LA

and coming to the South to go shoot anyway.

North Carolina had like stopped shooting,

there was some of the, they had lost the incentive,

and so we had to find a new place to shoot "Vice Principals"

and we were kind of, all of us were like,

"Let's just go find another"

"cool southern coastal town like Wilmington was."

And we came down to check out Charleston,

and instantly like dug it here.

But then when on our flight leaving,

Bill Murray was on the flight, and yeah,

and then he just sat there for like

the hour and 15 minutes between here to Atlanta,

telling us why Charleston would be

the grand city to shoot in,

and I think we're gonna take his word for it,

you know, it's like why not?

It works for him, let's go there.

- [Everyone] One nation under God, indivisible,