[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for the Season 4 premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones.”]
Throughout all four seasons of HBO‘s “The Righteous Gemstones,” series creator Danny McBride has reveled in the opportunity to jump genres, incorporating action sequences, musical numbers, and romance into his outrageous comedy series about the dysfunctional family behind a prospering megachurch. For the premiere episode of the show’s final season, McBride came up with his most audacious stylistic detour yet: a stand-alone prologue set in 1862 that depicts one of the Gemstones’ ancestors conning his way into a chaplain position during the Civil War.
McBride knew that he would be testing the audience’s patience a little bit by beginning the season without any of the characters viewers have come to know and love, so casting someone special in the lead role was imperative. “I knew it was going to be a tall order, because the show relies on an ensemble and now we’re going to have an episode that relies on no one the audience is showing up to see,” McBride told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It had to be somebody that was not going to disappoint the audience, somebody that has charisma and charm, like Bradley Cooper.”
McBride made the Bradley Cooper reference offhandedly to his producing partners and one of them asked the obvious question: why not just ask Bradley Cooper? “We were in ‘Aloha’ together, so I met him there,” McBride said. “I’ve always been a fan of his as an actor and a director, so I sent him the script and he responded instantly.”
Cooper’s interest in the role was solely based on the screenplay, since he had never actually seen “The Righteous Gemstones” — and didn’t want to familiarize himself with it until after he was done shooting his episode.
“He didn’t want to be influenced by the tone of the show, and I appreciated that,” McBride said. “Sometimes guest stars want to get laughs the way the people on the show get laughs, and it can make them do an impression of what other characters on the show are doing. I thought it was smart of him to identify that pitfall and avoid it.”
McBride needed a reliable collaborator to anchor the episode, because the assignment he created for himself — directing a Civil War epic in nine days on a television budget — was daunting. “It felt like an interesting challenge for everyone I work with,” McBride said. “Can we pull this off? Can we create something that feels credible in this time period? Most of it is daylight dependent, which made shooting it very tricky. Everything became about not only what was our vision, but then what can we actually pull off?”
One of the episode’s most impressive images, a long tracking shot depicting soldiers in the midst of battle, grew out of logistical necessity. “We had 200 extras that day, and I was like, once we put 100 union guys here and 100 confederate guys there, this is gonna seem pretty small,” McBride said.
With only a half-day to shoot the scene, McBride decided to devote all of the resources to one side of the battle and focus on one shot. “Then we could just practice that over and over and over again, and hopefully have enough rehearsal that when it comes time to do it, we can just execute it and pull it off.”
Throughout the episode, the coverage was largely dictated by how much time McBride had, but he turned that limited time into an advantage by choreographing long takes that not only served his practical needs but draw the audience into the story. For one walk-and-talk between Bradley Cooper and a child actor, McBride realized that every reset in between takes took 45 minutes because of all the troops and horses — that meant minimizing his set-ups, and minimizing the number of takes within those set-ups.
“That’s where it was really helpful to have somebody like Bradley Cooper in there,” McBride said. “He’s such a pro and he’s game — you were never doing it again because of him. He always delivered, and that was essential to pull this off.”
“The Righteous Gemstones” airs Sunday nights on HBO and is streaming on Max. To make sure you don’t miss Danny McBride’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
