The post Danny McBride Thought It Was “Logical” to Start The Righteous Gemstones’s Final Season in the Past appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Righteous Gemstones, Season 4 Episode 1, “Prelude.”]
The title of the show might be plural, but there was only one Gemstone in the Season 4 premiere of The Righteous Gemstones, and it wasn’t any of the main cast. Instead, the HBO comedy enlisted none other than 12-time Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper to play Elijah Gemstone, a Civil War-era ancestor of the Gemstone clan.
While Elijah is on the side of the South in the flashback episode, creator/director/star Danny McBride tells Consequence that “he’s really fighting for nobody, because he’s just kind of a scoundrel.” The episode begins with Elijah murdering a minister for his collection plate earnings, then assuming the man’s identity and becoming a preacher for a Confederate unit that faces no shortage of battles.
“Approaching the season and looking at it as the last season, it just felt perfect to start it by showing how it all began,” McBride says. “That was a logical place to kick this season off, especially when it’s kind of teeing up the ending of this.”
McBride says that he always knew “the family had a dubious beginning.” But it was during the shooting of the third season that he had the idea for “who that character was, and how he conned his way into this gig, but then finds faith through it.”
Initially, he wasn’t sure “how I was going to execute it — if it was going to just be a cold open, or something that someone would talk about. Then, when we approached the season and started opening that up, it just felt like it was a fun, rich world to give a peek into.”
Star Edi Patterson is also one of the writers on the show, which meant that she knew about the plans for the premiere early on. “It felt like a big, weird swing,” she says. “It’s a little mini-war movie and it gives you some insight, in a really cool way, as to why the Gemstones are the way they are.”
Cast member Tony Cavalero points out that the show is shot in South Carolina, very close to where the actual Civil War began in 1861. He wasn’t surprised that McBride was interested in exploring that territory, because “Danny is a history buff, and he’s from Fredericksburg. For me, I was like, ‘Alright dude, this is going to be cool and interesting and different.’ I know those flashback episodes are such fan favorites, and then obviously the casting was supremely exciting.”
McBride explained during a recent FYC event for the series that he didn’t realize they’d need a major guest star involved until after the script for the episode was written. “Suddenly the question is, well, who’s going to play this role? And I was like, oh man, I’m not really sure. I knew it would be a tough role because this show is obviously an ensemble — there are so many incredible actors here that the audience is showing up for. And to invite the audience back after the show’s been off for a little bit [without] any of these beautiful faces…” McBride laughed. “It had to be somebody who was more beautiful than all of us.”
More importantly, McBride noted, the star would need to be “somebody that has some real charisma and charm to pull off this turn with this character. Someone that the audience won’t mind going on this journey with, and somebody that can hold the entire thing on their own shoulders.” During a conversation with his producing partner Brandon James, McBride flippantly mentioned “‘Somebody like Bradley Cooper,’ and Brandon was like, ‘Well, we should just ask him.’ And it was like, ‘Okay, we can do that. We’re allowed to just ask people to do stuff.’”
Cooper responded “really quickly” to the offer, McBride said. “What was interesting is he had actually never seen Gemstones before, and then he didn’t want to watch it until we were done shooting, because he didn’t want to have it influence his performance. Which I thought was, was pretty smart. But surprisingly, I think he feels like a Gemstone — regardless of him not seeing it beforehand.”
The completed episode was screened for cast and crew towards the end of filming Season 4, and the cast was all blown away by it. “It was wild,” Adam Devine tells Consequence. “I couldn’t believe that that was happening. I was like, are they gonna be able to pull it off? Because it takes a lot to make something look like it’s a Civil War epic. And they did such a great job with it. It looks incredible.”
Tim Baltz also saw it at the cast and crew screening — and he didn’t even know the season premiere was set during the Civil War, as “I personally never read the flashback episodes, because I always want to see them like a regular fan of the show and have that surprise. So I was blown away.”
Adds Cassidy Freeman, “It was like watching a film, a really good war film. And it was so cool to be like, ‘That’s our show.’ How cool and different and fun… Not a lot of teams could pull that off.”
New episodes of The Righteous Gemstones premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.
Danny McBride Thought It Was “Logical” to Start The Righteous Gemstones’s Final Season in the Past
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