He was plucked from obscurity by Will Ferrell and soon found himself sharing scenes with Tom Cruise and hotels with Steve Coogan. Now, TV’s funniest egotist is back – and taking on televangelists

Danny McBride has been a lot of arrogant men over the years. He’s napalmed jungles for fun. He’s pronounced himself the world’s greatest baseball player – despite a paunch like a department-store Santa. He has made deluded braggadocio into an artform and recently, he achieved its holiest of holy grails.

“Kanye asked me to play him in a movie of his life,” he laughs. “That was a pretty stunning phone call to get. I don’t know why he wanted me to do it. Maybe that sense of ego I’m able to portray? I have no clue.”

This, however, is not the project he is here to promote, though it is just as riotous as you imagine a Kanye biopic would be. McBride is in the UK for the launch of his third HBO sitcom, The Righteous Gemstones, a spoof about a money-grubbing church family in the US South. As he lolls affably on a sofa at a Soho hotel, it’s hard to reconcile the humble McBride with characters like West, or the conceited televangelist Jesse Gemstone.

He emphasises the luck behind his big break, which thrust him almost instantaneously from dead end jobs into critically acclaimed comedies and Hollywood roles alongside Tom Cruise, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. And it’s all down to the fact that one day in high school, he decided to go to the toilet in the middle of a class.

“Ah, I think about that piss often,” says McBride. “I passed this kid in the hall by chance who was dropping his resume off for the North Carolina School of the Arts. I was like: ‘What’s that? I’ve never heard of that!’ and he was like: ‘Oh, it’s this new film school.’ I applied and got in and he sadly didn’t. I stole his life.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The show HBO wanted to can ... McBride as Kenny Powers in Eastbound and Down. Photograph: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock

There, he met long-term collaborators Jody Hill and David Gordon Green. Inspired by a love of English comedy (think Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan), Hill and McBride decided to write a character “that had an underlying sadness – something pathetic about them which makes you unsure whether you’re meant to hate or like them”. Fist Foot Way, a low-budget film starring McBride as an egotistical taekwondo teacher, saw Will Ferrell sign the pair to his production company. It also earned them an invite to the set of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, where McBride found the likes of Seth Rogen quoting lines back to him. “It was nuts. I’d never even been on a real movie set before,” he recalls. “Jody and I went back to his apartment and were like: ‘Is this happening? Is this real?’”

Within a year, McBride was playing a dopey drug dealer in Pineapple Express and an explosives expert in action movie parody Tropic Thunder. The latter found him sharing a hotel with Steve Coogan, though he’s not sure if their mutual love of anti-heroes came up in conversation (“We definitely had a few nights which were pretty awesome. Did we talk about comedy? I can’t remember. It was mainly drinking.”)

But it was with his first HBO show, the Ferrell-produced Eastbound and Down, that he really began to make ripples. McBride’s determination to “dare people to have a bit more empathy with someone you don’t like on the surface” certainly challenged his colleagues, as he put his all into the role of Kenny Powers: a cocaine-snorting, morally repugnant failed baseball star turned high school sports teacher.

“When the episodes started coming in, HBO were like ‘What is this? Who is this guy? He’s such an asshole!’” Only Ferrell’s involvement stopped the show from being canned, and the network refused to market it unless the character was toned down. “But we were young, and went: ‘Fuck it. I’ve never seen a commercial for something on HBO before. People just tune in.’ So we stuck to our guns and kept it the way we wanted.”

In the end, they didn’t need the ads. The show took off to the extent that McBride was offered a job as a pitcher on a genuine Floridian baseball team (“I said no: I can barely throw a baseball”) and became so inseparable from his character that it made socialising impossible. “I couldn’t go to bars any more. It was like a nightmare,” he sighs. “I was doing Kenny Powers to make fun of him and people just thought that was how I was.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In god we trust? ... The Righteous Gemstones. Photograph: HBO/Sky Atlantic

Ten years on, this is less of a problem, particularly given attempts to shun type-casting with more serious work such as a role in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant and writing the 2018 remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. But, like Eastbound and Down and 2016 high school drama Vice Principals, there are plenty of things that will cause a stir in The Righteous Gemstones. For one, there are more flaccid penises than in a football changing room (“we just felt like showing cock was very Old Testament – a lot of ancient works had penis in them,” he laughs). Besides, the show is rife with demeaning barbs at its female characters. “Reading the Bible, there are a lot of misogynistic points of view in there. I wanted to explore that with this family,” he explains.

The show is also a fascinating insight into the US phenomenon of megachurches. A form of corporate Christianity, it sees old shopping malls turned into giant places of worship, with owners whose business goals demand a congregation that grows year-on-year – or they fire the pastor. “Some of the things are beyond even the jokes we were doing,” laughs McBride. “When we were making it, a video went viral of these two pastors taking about how god wanted them to have private jets because he didn’t want them riding in those tubes with all the demons.”

HBO has already renewed the show for a second season. Which is good news, given that it’s a hilarious watch. But bad news, given that it stands in the way of that Kanye film. Might it happen? After all, Ye’s obviously keen – he made the effort to fly all the way down to visit McBride, even agreeing to watch his seven-year-old son play online shooter Fortnite. “That was a pretty incredible day. Maybe someday we’ll make the film. Who knows?” Indeed, for the moment, it’s Jesus, not Yeezus he’s got on the brain.



The Righteous Gemstones is on Sky Comedy and NOW TV from 5 February at 9pm