Danny McBride has a semi-permanent twinkle in his eyes.
He often looks like a kid caught in a candy store, particularly when he talks about the creativity that comes with being a famous and successful actor, director, screenwriter and producer.
McBride, who lives on Sullivan’s Island with his wife, a painter, and two children, might look to some like a regular working stiff with a mop of curly hair and a scruffy beard if you ran into him at a Charleston auto parts store or fancy restaurant.
But you’d recognize him for his lead roles in two HBO dark comedy series — as Jesse Gemstone in The Righteous Gemstones or Neal Gamby in Vice Principals, which first brought McBride to Charleston. Or maybe you know him from cult-like, goofball films Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express. Or perhaps you’ve heard his voice in animated features like Despicable Me, Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Angry Birds Movie.
McBride’s trademark comic sense now is adding another dimension: He’s moving back in time to paper thanks to his first collection of 10 quirky and fun short stories being published at the end of the month by Random House. The book, titled Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, launches 7 p.m. June 29 at Charleston Music Hall with a discussion with journalist and magazine publisher John Huey. Tickets to the event, co-presented by Buxton Books and the hall, are $78 and come with a book.
The Lowcountry attracts McBride and family
Born in Statesboro, Ga., when his parents attended Georgia Southern University, McBride moved with his family to Lompoc, Calif., when he was young after his father took a job as a prison guard. McBride remembers growing up on a prison reservation and attending elementary school before the family moved to northern Virginia when his father shifted to work in the federal Bureau of Prisons. He graduated from high school near Fredericksburg and then went to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem to learn how to make films.
McBride first worked as a second unit director on the 2000 film George Washington, soon falling into some acting roles. By the middle of the decade, he wrote and starred in the HBO series Eastbound and Down in which he played a washed-up baseball pitcher. His career then took off.
By the time he came to Charleston first in 2015 to film Vice Principals, he and his wife were sick of Los Angeles, its traffic and the inanity of having to sign up for time to swing a kid in a neighborhood park. The Lowcountry was a godsend where people were really nice and the pace was slower and genteel.
“I love the culture here, and the people are so friendly,” he said. “How messed up has this world gotten when it seems like a big deal that people say hi and ask you how you’re doing?”
Growing up in Fredericksburg, he said he also learned to love history, which Charleston has in droves.
“I’ve loved living somewhere where epic things have happened,”he said. “I find it fascinating. Charleston definitely has scratched that itch for me.
“I also think that whenever you live somewhere where there’s significant nature, it just creates a happier populace — when people get excited about the weather warming up and being able to get out on boats and hit the water and stuff. It’s more exciting than living near the 101 freeway and everyone stressing out about traffic all the time.”
After tasting the joys of the Lowcountry, the family moved here in 2017. McBride then started working on projects to bring Hollywood to Charleston. And it’s worked.
The thrill of a new book
People may not realize how much of McBride’s film life has been involved with writing. Early in his career, he started writing screenplays and television series scripts. The latter, in particular, can be all consuming when balancing directing, producing and acting, too — especially when the writing is still going on when filming has already started. That creates a special kind of pressure that is energizing and crushing, said McBride, who has written more than 80 episodes of television over the last two decades.
“It’s a blast doing it,” he said. “But finishing the script is just the very beginning of a longer negotiation. The script is the blueprint for what’s to come,” such as deciding where to shoot it, whether there’s enough money, whether certain actors will be available, whether actors want lines changed, whether the weather will cooperate, and on and on.
“It’s fun because sometimes things happen unexpectedly or sometimes you’re forced to challenge what you imagined and you get something better than you imagined.”
There’s also a joy in collaborating with others to make something good even better.
“I like creating this bubble where you have a bunch of artists you like and appreciate and everybody puts their head on what the project is and everyone’s trying to figure out how to make it better,” he said. “There’s something that’s a lot of fun about that.”
But the nonstop pace was wearing and McBride said he wanted to stretch his brain in a novel direction. So he started messing around with writing fiction — mostly for himself. At one point, he hand-wrote three pages of ideas every day. After a couple of years, he filled up four notebooks. Then he went through them to mine for whether something could be reshaped, which led to more ideas and eventually a group of short stories.
“One thing led to another, and I just found myself really enjoying it,” the actor said. “It ended up being the perfect antidote to what I was feeling coming off the Gemstones, which is, I just was feeling like I wanted to change gears. It was nice to write [fiction]. When the story is done, it’s done.”
And besides an editor or two, there are no collaborators. The stories are his.
“I had a lot of fun writing on this,” he said. “The pressure was off.”
The new book’s 10 stories range from a quirky tale about robots and humans to an outsized tale of a fiction writer who gets stalked by a guy who burns the writer’s new book in Southern bookstores.
There’s also a story about a guy’s reaction to someone who parked a boat in front of his house. And the opening story tells of a different guy who tries to create a media sensation by hanging in a clear glass cage suspended for a month in a mall. These tales keep you coming back for more — wondering how each will end.
McBride said he spent much of last year working on the stories. Part of the attraction of writing short stories was that he got to develop lots of different characters and ideas. For Gemstones, he worked with the same characters for seven years. He wanted a break from that.
“With every story, it’s a whole brand new batch of characters, brand new situations, brand new scenarios and there was something really fun about that,” he said. “There were definitely some ideas that had been floating around that I got to execute here, but I also think it kind of opened up my brain.”
About Danny McBride
Age: 49.
Family: Wife and two children.
Nouns he uses to describe himself: Father, husband, friend.
Professions: Actor, director, producer, writer and storyteller.
Favorite writers: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Jim Thompson.
Favorite area restaurants: “There’s so many great restaurants here” including The Obstinate Daughter, Chubby Fish, Marbled and Fin, Edmund’s Oast and 167 Raw.
Favorite dive: The Royal American. “That place is just fantastic.”
Favorite comedians: Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, John Hughes, Harold Ramis, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle.
Did you know: He voiced Duane Earl, the fictional host of a conservative radio talk show in the Grand Theft Auto V video game.
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