Although he was born December 29, 1976 in Statesboro,
Georgia, Danny McBride grew up in Fredericksburg,
Virginia. "There's a lot of Civil War action there," he
told GQ. "George Washington's mom lived there. So
there's a lot to live up to." He hasn't done too badly
so far, and is almost certainly funnier than George
Washington or his mother.
“I grew up in
a really small town,” he recalled to Seth Rogen in Interview
magazine, “so your choices of things to get into were, like,
maybe hunting or football or drugs. Or drama.” Having made
movies on VHS as a kid, most with clay figures or fireworks, and
having no interest in attending a traditional college where “you
have to write papers all the time,” he enrolled in film courses
at the North Carolina School of the Arts. “I can’t even remember
not wanting to go to film school. Ever since I was born, I was
like, ‘I’m going to go to film school. One day, I’m going to go
to film school.’” McBride did not envision a future as a
filmmaker, however, but thought, “Maybe one day I can teach
film.”
After leaving
school, though, he began shooting film with his friends,
including Jody Hill with whom he would frequently collaborate in
the future, while surviving by working a variety of jobs which
included a stint as a production assistant on Battle Dome, an
American Gladiators style exercise in machismo. “Our finest day
was when one of the Battle Dome warriors broke his ankle, and we
had to form a line around him so that the audience couldn’t see
him cry.”
McBride’s
breakthrough would be awhile in coming, but when things began to
happen for him, they seemed to happen fast. “It seems like
overnight,” he said, “because all the successes and
opportunities are coming at once, but we’ve been working at this
since we got out of school, getting nowhere with it.”
They finally
got somewhere with The Foot Fist Way, a zany comedy shot
in North Carolina for $70,000 on a 17 day schedule. In a script
he co-wrote with Hill, who also directed, and Ben Best, McBride
was cast as Fred Simmons, an obnoxious and fascistic tae kwan do
instructor. In short, a jerk who is unaware that the world is
laughing at him. The film received a midnight screening at the
2006 Sundance Film Festival where the audience reaction was
disappointing. “Before anything even happened in the movie, all
these people were getting up and leaving and going out,” he
remembers. “But to the people who were left, it seemed like the
movie played okay.” Eventually, tapes and DVDs of the movie
began to make the rounds in
Hollywood.
“I don’t
remember who called, but one day I flipped,” McBride says. “Will
Ferrell has seen this movie and liked it and wants to put his
name on it.” Through Ferrell and Adam McKay, The Foot Fist
Way (“The story of a man who teaches people how to kick
other people in the face,” read the poster’s tagline) was picked
up for distribution by Paramount Vantage. Finally reaching
theaters in 2008, the film’s humor was an acquired taste.
“I cannot
recommend this movie,” Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago
Sun-Times, “but I can describe it, and then it’s up to you.”
Ebert found the hero “loathesome and reprehensible,” but
admitted that “I laughed in spite of myself,” while praising
McBride as “appallingly convincing” playing a character “who
might almost exist in these vulgar times.” Variety
agreed, saying “Simmons will make audiences cringe - but there’s
undeniable humor in his blithely unaware repulsiveness.” Peter
Travers in Rolling Stone gave the film a rave (“This
hilarious high-kicking nonsense costs two cents and looks it,
but you’ll laugh helplessly, anyway”) and so did The New York
Times which called it “an itsy-bitsy, ultra-indie,
super-silly comedy packing huge laughs and unexpected heart.”
McBride would briefly reprise the role in a February 2008
segment of Late Night with Conan O’ Brien, an appearance
that was probably seen by more people than saw the film in
theaters, but bootleg copies were finding their way to an
appreciate and influential audience.
Producer Judd
Apatow saw the film when an agent gave him a DVD copy. "He has
his own comic sensibility," Apatow observed. "Danny is a nice
and easy and well-mannered Southern man with a very disgusting,
hilarious sense of humor." After seeing The Fist Foot Way,
Apatow thought, “How can I get Danny into one of my movies so
that people will think that I discovered him, even though I
didn’t?”
Apatow cast
McBride as Red, the dope dealing pal of James Franco and Seth
Rogan, in the pro-pot comedy, Pineapple Express, directed
by David Gordon Green. “You know, actually, I went to film
school with David my freshman year of college,” McBride said,
“so I had been friends with him for awhile and written a bunch
of stuff together.” McBride’s part in the film was brief, but he
improvised some of his funniest lines, and says, “I’m lucky that
all I just get to do is get shot and do stuff, so it’s kind of
easy. You don’t have to carry any of the weight of the
exposition or anything.”
McBride did
feel pressure when his uncontrolled laughter ruined several
takes. “David would leave the set sometimes, so it was a little
disheartening.” The filming was also dangerous with most of the
cast suffering injuries during the stunts. “(James Franco)
busted a bong over the back of my head and split my head open,”
he recalls. A day later, Franco split his head when running into
a tree. “So it just seemed kind of like it was par for the
course. If you didn’t have an injury, you weren’t really part of
the film.”
Pineapple
Express
was warmly
received. “It’s a quality movie even if the material is unworthy
of the treatment,” wrote Roger Ebert. “As a result, yes, it’s a
druggie comedy that made me laugh.” It made audiences laugh,
too, grossing more than $80 million in the
U.S.
He also had a role in Tropic Thunder whose director, Ben
Stiller, said of McBride, “He’s one of the most uniquely funny
guys to come around since Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.”
Appearing in two such high-profile
Hollywood
comedies brought McBride into the public eye like never before.
"I guess it's my big summer," he told USA Today. "I don't
know. I feel like I've had more eventful ones when I was a kid.
I'm just lucky that I was able to land in these two movies."
McBride took
to television with HBO’s East Bound and Down, a series
co-produced by Will Ferrell. “I play a major league pitcher who
has lost his fastball, and he’s spent all his money and he’s
just down on his luck,” McBride said in explaining the show. “So
he comes back to the town that he grew up in and crashes with
his brother.” In reviewing the show’s premiere episode, The
San Francisco Chronicle called it “mostly stupid, frequently
unfunny and covers for its lack of original comic material by
dropping f-bombs all over the place.” Despite the critical
drubbing, East Bound and Down had its devotees and was
renewed for a second season.
He was back
on the big screen in Land of the Lost, one of the most
anticipated films released in summer 2008. “As big as this movie
is, there’s really like only four actors in it, so it feels
really small," McBride said. "So it still feels intimate, but
it’s just gi-normous.” The film starred Will Ferrell who played
such a pivotal role in McBride's career, "but this was the first
time I got a chance to really work with him, and he was
awesome." The big-budget revision of a kid’s show from the
1970's was also an awesome dud, a flop with critics and
audiences alike. “If you don’t find Land of the Lost, you
won’t have missed much,” Claudia Puig sneered in USA Today.
As Roger Ebert observed, the movie “inspires fervent hatred,”
but he was one of the few critics to give it a pass.
McBride had a
smaller role in the same year’s Up in the Air. The most
prestigious film in which he had yet been cast, it was
attracting serious award buzz from the moment it was released.
It would prove to be a contender for the 2009 Academy Award for
best picture.
“When you
make a choice to be in something, you always hope that it
resonates with people,” McBride said. The Jason Reitman-directed
film with George Clooney as a corporate hitman who travels the
country to fire people, had a lot of resonance in an era of
greed and corporate downsizing. “There was always something
special about this,” McBride said of the film. “I remember when
I first got the script, when Jason sent it to me, I really
responded to it. It was an intelligent piece of work. I liked
the tone, and how Reitman intercuts real people who’ve been laid
off with the rest of the movie.”
What's next
for this new comic wunderkind?
There's
Your Highness, a comedy he co-wrote with Ben Best that stars
two of this year's Oscar nominees, Natalie Portman and James
Franco. "It's an idea that David and I had back in film school.
The concept then was just, like, I'm a knight who gets stoned
and kills dragons. I look at the footage and like 'I can't
believe a studio paid money for us to do this.'"
by