When you talk to people involved in the making of Your Highness, they insist that it's not a spoof. That what they've done is introduce the wild-card element of McBride into a super-faithful homage to enthrallingly crappy '80s sword-and-sorcery flicks like Krull and Dragonslayer. It's a ridic­ulous movie, the cinematic equivalent of an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual with boobies and spurting wieners graffitied in the margins. But it's a ridiculous movie made with great care and a cast that features not one but two 2011 Academy Award nominees (James Franco, in a giant codpiece, and Natalie Portman, really going for it in ye olde thong bikini). And it's actually coming out, like real movies do.

And no one involved with Your Highness can talk about all this without giggling a little bit, at the improbability of it all.

Its lead actor and co-writer is no exception. McBride's in a dive bar in New York on a Monday afternoon, just him and a couple of serious bar-goyles clamped to stools and a bartender facilitating their midday buzz. When we walked in a minute ago, George Thorogood and the Destroyers were power-chooglin' through "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" on the jukebox. Aside from maybe "Bad to the Bone," it was almost too perfectly hack-soundtrackish a song to walk into a bar to, and McBride and I were both sort of embarrassed, like maybe we should have tried our entrance again when something less on-the-nose was playing.

It was too Kenny Powers, is the thing. Kenny, the former big-league pitcher turned major-league train wreck McBride plays on Eastbound & Down, the instant-classic HBO tragicomedy he co-created with writer-director Jody Hill and writer-actor Ben Best, would roll with it. Kenny would strut across this bar, insult everybody in it, and start and lose three pool-cue fights before George & Co. finished the last chorus. But Kenny's a study in swaggering, mullet-brained self-delusion, and McBride is McBride—an accomplished actor and screenwriter, one of the smartest men in dumb comedy, 34, newly married, able to reference both the Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews and Revenge of the Nerds II in casual conversation.

So it's weird, walking in on this song, the way walking into a room with Tom Cruise where "Old Time Rock & Roll" is playing would be weird. Slinking to the back, we obtain one table, two stools, and two beers. For a second, when McBride holds up his pint and says "This is lunch" by way of a toast, you can almost see whatever small part of him is Kenny Powers warming up his pitchin' arm—but only for a second.

And then he's explaining Your Highness, as best he can. How it all started as a joke. How he and his old film-school buddy David Gordon Green—who cast McBride in All the Real Girls back in 2002, directed him years later in Pineapple Express, and occupied that chair again on Your Highness—used to play this movie-nerd game years ago, where Green would throw out a title and McBride would start pitching him back "fuckin' retarded ideas for movies."

Green would say something like Face of Danger, and they'd come up with "some weird story about Steve Danger, who's a plastic surgeon and he solves mysteries." _Your Highness _was one of those. Green said it; McBride said, "What if I was in the Middle Ages fighting dragons and getting stoned all the time?"

Neither of them thought about it again until years later, when The Foot Fist Way—a tiny movie about a blowhard Tae Kwon Do instructor that McBride starred in and co-wrote with Best and Hill, who went into credit card debt to finance production—became a sensation, and people in the position to put up money for things started asking McBride what he wanted to do next.