By Brian Frazer

In order to comprehend the meteoric rise of Danny McBride, you'd have to duct tape a crate of lit bottle rockets to your ribcage then have yourself shot out of a cannon while inside the express elevator to fame. Some guy named Will Ferrell happened to see The Foot Fist Way, an obscure $70,000 movie McBride made with his buddies on one of their credit cards--and the phone hasn't stopped ringing since. Despite roles in Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder and the upcoming Land of the Lost (with Ferrell), McBride remains indelibly linked to sports. His performances as a struggling Tae Kwon Do instructor in Foot Fist and his washed-up reliever, Kenny Powers, in HBO's Eastbound and Down have made him the poster-boy for the ex-star-athlete now sentenced to an eternity of misery. Fortunately for McBride, with today's shitty economy and apocalyptic forecasts, his characters are resonating like a cowbell in the Grand Canyon. The number of people falling into the rabbit hole of despair could very well be the planet's fastest growing demographic.

I walked into the backyard of a palatial estate in Beverly Hills--the type of place former major league star Kenny Powers would have probably lived before his pitching arm broke down--and sat in a lawn chair at the sun-drenched poolside. Had we been meeting in a dive bar, it would have been a challenge to pick out thirty-two year old McBride in the crowd. Sporting a brown, tie-dyed skeleton geisha T-shirt, goatee and a gut that's signed a ten-year lease, Danny McBride is the ultimate everyman. And, now that Mitch Williams has retired, he might own the world's most famous mullet. Unlike his on-screen persona, McBride oozes a rare kind of affable sweetness that anyone from your priggish great-aunt to a Hell's Angel would find ingratiating. For one of Hollywood's hottest stars, he seemed genuinely happy to be interviewed. It was hard to believe this was the same guy who plays one of the most pompous, self-absorbed characters in television history. As we shook hands, an assistant came by to ask what he wanted to drink.

"O.J., soda, bottled water, beer..."
"Beer."
It was barely noon on Thursday.

Read the full feature story after the jump.


I immediately asked if he would sign my Kenny Powers baseball card--which was in some magazine promotion I tore out while I was getting my hair cut. McBride promptly scribbled, "Fuck You! -Kenny Powers." Perfect! We were off.

Mean is in now--we have House, Dexter, Curb. Isn't it a relief that you don't have to be nice on TV anymore?

I think it's great. We approached Eastbound trying to take an anti-hero sort of character because we just kind of felt like there have already been enough stories about good guys and there's only so much ground you can cover. Starting with a guy who's more complicated and morally corrupt, it just seemed like it could give us a little more to run with.

As Kenny Powers, you play a dysfunctional asshole looking for love and acceptance in asshole-y ways. But you seem to be able to make us sympathetic to the character. How do you pull that off?

I have no idea. I'd like to say a lot of it is in the writing--we'd try to find ways that we could have fun with Kenny being a dick but at the same time not turn him into a cartoon character and really try to find those moments of weakness or that kind of glimpse into him, where you can kind of get a justification for his asshole-ish behavior. You said asshole-y--I like that. I've never heard that.

Thanks, it's yours. You've basically made a living playing douchebags. What's the worst thing you've done to a human being off camera?

I'm a pretty nice guy. I haven't really done a lot of fucked up shit to people before. When I was a kid I took a pellet gun and shot it through someone's house and it landed in their living room next to where the dad said his children usually sit and watch TV. I didn't mean to, obviously, do that. It was a mistake. But that was probably the most fucked up thing I've done.

Yeah, but that was an accident.

Who should be aiming a gun at someone's house though? That's not a cool thing to do.

How old were you?

Probably ninth grade.

Ok, so you were probably drunk.

Yeah, well ninth grade--so more like high on crack.

Does Kenny Powers bleed into you at all?

When we were shooting the TV show my fiance and I were in the grocery store late at night and I fucking pulled her pants down in the middle of the store. That's mean, right? I didn't think they'd go that easily.

The beauty of elastic. How'd you meet your fiance?

I met her out here in Los Angeles. She, at the time, was helping deaf and blind people. So she seemed like a good person to latch onto in L.A.

Hold on a second! There are actually people who HELP people in L.A.? How do you meet somebody like that here?

At a Superbowl party. [Laughs] I'm not a really big sports fan, so I didn't really give a shit about the game, and I just saw this girl sitting over there and I just gave a shit about her, so I just started talking to her and then we kind of ended up going on a date after that and now she's been on this whole wild ride with me. It's been pretty cool.

Are you ever going to marry her?

Yeah, we're engaged. We just have to set the date.

Yeah, but engaged means nothing. Come on, I'm a guy. I know people who've been engaged for twelve years.

No, I definitely want to get married. I'm up for having kids and doing the whole deal. Yeah, I think it'd be cool.

Would Kenny Powers ever marry anybody?

No.

Your characters seem to have a lot of trouble with women. How'd you do with the ladies pre-stardom--and obviously I'm going back to pre-fiance?

You know, I've been with my lady for quite some time now--for seven years, so my game before fame and after is exactly the same. It's come home and fucking watch TV and tell her to roll over.

And then you pretend she's in Trader Joe's and pull her pants down. "Eastbound and Down" is the theme song from Smokey and the Bandit. Why a song from that movie instead of say, Slumdog Millionaire?

We used "Jai Ho!" for a while, and it didn't really stick. People weren't really digging it. In a way, this is kind of a throwback to some of those Burt Reynolds movies. You know, it seems like back in the day, like back in the early eighties, late seventies, you could have movies, or anything about the South, that wasn't necessarily just made for people in the South, and that's what we wanted to do--make something that takes place in the South but isn't geared towards just Southerners. The hipster in New York should be able to get it as well as the dude fucking shingling a roof in North Carolina.

How do you get the mullet on? Is it a clip-on, or glued?

When we did the pilot, I had to have real extensions put in that I had to wear all the time, even when we weren't shooting. After doing that for two weeks I was like, I need to figure out another way to do this. There's no way I can go through this whole show fucking looking like this for real. So they put this like halo wig on that would just be the mullet and they would blend it in. I felt like I was cheating a little bit, but it worked.

Kenny has a definite style. Does anything that he wears on the show belong to you?

None of the clothes belong to me. With Kenny, we were like, What the fuck does Kenny Powers wear? And we were seeing all this sort of sportswear that breathes really weird or dries sweat off of you quick—that stuff that me or my friends never really wear. So we were like, This would be cool, to be a guy that wears this shit.

Speaking of clothes, one of my favorite moments in Eastbound--I think it was Episode 4--is when your assistant shows up at the same party as you and you get pissed at him because you're both wearing black. So you tell him to do something about it. Then in the next scene, since people don't generally bring a change of clothes to parties, he's shirtless.

Yeah. [Laughs] That was something we improv'd. We had him wearing black and it was just going to be that he was dressed like Kenny, and when we got to the set, me and David Green, the guy who directed that episode, we were just looking at Stevie and said, "This looks funny, but it would be so funny if somehow we could get him naked. How about if it's just that Kenny's pissed that he's dressed in black and then we just have Stevie shirtless for the rest of it, like Kenny made him take his shirt off so they wouldn't look the same." We just made that up on the set and then you know--you take Steve Little's shirt off and instantly you have comedy gold.

How much of the show is improv'd in general?

A lot of it. We don't usually improv with storyline stuff. We make sure the character arcs are there and we know the beats we have to hit with the story but once we get in there and start shooting, I mean--Adam McKay directs an episode, then Jody Hill, David Green--all those guys love the improv. So we'll shoot the version from the script and then from there we just open it up and see what we can come up with.

You originally came out here to write and direct, so you obviously have a writing background. Does that help you as an actor?

I think it definitely does. And I went to film school for directing and I think that, without really realizing it, I did have training in acting just from knowing how a set works--knowing what, as a director, you need to tell people to get them to do what you need them to do. I've crewed on fucking movies and TV shows so I've even fucking pulled cables and moved sandbags around, so I get how a set works and what everyone's doing there. I think with writing it really helps with the improv too because it doesn’t turn the improv into just stand-up--you're improv'ing with a point, to try to find alternate ways to get to what the meat of the scene is.

Since you studied directing, would you like to do it in the future or are you happy being the guy in front of the camera?

Yeah, I would like to direct, like sooner rather than later. I like the acting--I think it's great, but to me I get more gratification from something like Eastbound, where we crafted the story and the characters. I like being behind the camera almost more than being in front of it so I would definitely try to transition into something like that as soon as I can.

The most amazing thing about your career is that you've never been on an audition and you've never had a head shot.

Yeah, I never had a head shot. I went on like two auditions right after All the Real Girls--the first movie I did with David Green--and instantly was just like, I'm not doing this shit, this is terrible. I'm horrible at auditioning. I enjoyed doing All the Real Girls with David, but I did it just as a favor for him--I went to school with him and wrote with him and stuff. So he got in a pinch with an actor and kind of knew that I knew what he was going for with the character, so I kind of stepped in for that. And I had a good time doing it, so I was like, Maybe acting will be fun, and I went to my first audition and was like, Ahhhhh, I don't want to do this.

Well in my opinion, you have the best forehead expressions in modern television history. I mean the subtleties--it's almost like there's a puppeteer above you with strings attached to your temples.

Yeah, my forehead is a beast unto its own. It does its own shit. [Laughs]

This is actually your second stint in Los Angeles. After the first one, things didn't go so well, so you moved back to Virginia to substitute teach and bartend.

It was pretty crazy. I was living at my parents' house at the time. I was saying that I was going back to Virginia to write but it was really because I had failed and I didn't have money to move back to L.A. yet and so I was with my parents. I would get up at like 5:45 every morning, go fucking get a shower, run to school, be at school until like three o'clock, and then head across town and get to the bar. I started working at like five and then I’d be there until like two or three in the morning. It was brutal.

The weird thing is that as a relief pitcher you're the center of attention. Just like you are in teaching and bartending.

In both you're the center of attention and you're dealing with people who don't behave all the time so you gotta figure out cool ways to deal with them. And a lot of times, you see people late at night at the bar so then the next day you can warn the students not to become that person.

While I was watching Foot Fist, I kept wondering if you were any good at Tae Kwon Do.

I never took Tae Kwon Do. I took Isshin Ryu growing up as a kid, which is another type of karate, so I knew the world of martial arts through a kid's eyes of going to a dojo. But I didn't know Tae Kwon Do--Jody Hill was the Tae Kwon Do man. He was actually a black belt. He taught kids when he was in high school, so he knew a lot about the world, and I did some very intense training. I think I trained for maybe like two or three days, you know? Which really just translated into 16-year-old girls beating the shit out of me in a class. That was it.

So when did you stop your martial arts training?

I stopped in sixth grade. I can still remember because I was doing exceptionally well and then my instructor moved me into the advanced class and then I was just, for like three weeks in a row, just getting my ass beat by 16-year-olds, and so I just quit karate. I didn't become a man--I ran.

What belt did you make it to--like orange or something?

No, I got to green belt brown tip.

I've never heard of that brown tip part. Sounds like it's just so they can milk you for another forty-five bucks.

Exactly.

You say you're not much of a sports fan, which is now officially ironic on two fronts. Not only do you play ex-athletes but the Pensacola Pelicans of the Independent League have just offered Kenny Powers a minor league contract. Any interest? C'mon, wouldn't it be fun to at least sit on the bench?

It would be. We're in negotiations. That might not just be a publicity stunt. That might be something real.

Yeah, because you could always pinch run.

That'd be awesome, and it would be cool to ride on a van--on a big bus with all those players. I never have had that experience.

So you haven't said "no" yet?

I haven't said "no." I told HBO I'd do it if they picked up the show for another season.

Have the HBO people instructed you not to work out too much like AMC did with January Jones on Mad Men?

They didn't have to because we just know that there's a certain level of weight that one needs to have to really make a masterful comedy. And so, that was all instincts: Stay fat. Don't work out. Eat shit.

Any other rules in the "Stay Fat" program?

If it looks good, order two of them.

In the upcoming Land of the Lost you play a redneck survivalist. Any survival tips that translate into today's world?

I've read that, in a lot of things, that the character is a survivalist. He's not really. He owns a gas station. The basic survival skill for Land of the Lost is being able to run faster than a T. Rex.

So basically hamstring stretches.

Hamstring stretches, squats, a lot of lunges, you know--that kind of stuff.

And sensible shoes.

Yeah. Very sensible--not Florsheims. That's definitely not what you rock.

Finally... Drillbit Taylor 2. You in or out?

Uhhh... I think I'll sit this one out. I'll let the kids really take control of it.