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whadu · Level 49: GameShark **Posts:** 37198 **Timestamp:** Wed Aug 06, 08 8:53 AM

Orlando Sentinel: He's in the two funniest comedies of the summer of 2008.

But in the late 1990s you could find Danny McBride in film school, daydreaming of the day when his name would be above the title, the last opening credit, "directed by," one "major motion picture."

A funny thing about those years at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Danny's friend and classmate David Gordon Green graduated and started making movies. Other classmates did the same.

"Film school is where you find a good group of guys to hang with," McBride says. "Turns out, a bunch of my classmates started having some success."

And Danny? He started turning up in their movies. Turns out he's funnier onscreen than behind the camera. This year audiences are discovering the 31-year-old Virginia native with the Blue Ribbon belly and Southern-fried twang.

McBride, of Drillbit Taylor, The Foot Fist Way, this week's Pineapple Express and next week's Tropic Thunder, could be, as The L.A. Times recently opined, "the next comedy superstar."

"I never thought for a minute that anyone would EVER want to see my face on the screen," McBride says, laughing. "Not looking for an acting career at all, but David [Gordon Green] had cast an actor in All the Real Girls who had to pull out at the last minute. I had written things with David in college. He was my next-door neighbor when we were both in the School of the Arts. He knew I had the sense of humor he was going for with this character, so by default, he asked me to come in and try it.

"Then Jody Hill called and got it into his head that I'd be good in this crazy martial-arts comedy he wanted to do, The Foot Fist Way."

That movie, with McBride playing a competent but abrasive and seriously delusional martial-arts instructor, became one of those cult comedies that grabbed the attention of funny people all over Hollywood, including Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Judd Apatow.

"Somebody slipped me a copy of Foot Fist," Apatow remembers. "I watched and I thought, 'Is this like the funniest thing anybody has sent me, EVER?' I thought, 'I HAVE to work with the guy.' So we cast him in Drillbit Taylor and in Pineapple Express."

McBride promptly paid back the classmate who gave him his start. He lobbied for Gordon Green, a filmmaker known for his Southern gothic stylings (Undertow, George Washington), to direct the pothead action comedy Pineapple Express. Apatow listened.

Ben Stiller fell for the guy, too. He brought McBride onto The Heartbreak Kid and Tropic Thunder. McBride's specialty in all these films is sort of a hip, post-racist, post-Cable Guy Southern jerk -- Red State and a little redneck, Jack Black or Seth Rogen with a drawl.

"Hollywood doesn't really have a good grasp of what the modern Southern man is all about," McBride says. "They're still stuck in this redneck Beverly Hillbillies/Hee Haw thing. There's plenty of funny things about Southern men, believe me. You don't have to stop with just the drawl or the Confederate flag or whatever. Get past the past, the racism, and try to do what Southern men have done, which is to try and find a new image."

His next shot at changing that image is East Bound and Down, which has McBride's old classmate, Jody Hill, and new friends Adam McKay and Will Ferrell involved. It's a comedy series he hopes HBO picks up.

"It's kind of about the state of the American hero right now. It's about a guy, a major league pitcher, Kenny Powers, a total [jerk] who loses his fastball and goes off in search of his heat, his mojo. Maybe it'll fly, maybe it won't. But either way, these last couple of years? Working with Seth and Stiller and Ferrell and tied up with Nick Nolte on Kauai [for Tropic Thunder]? Surreal, man.."

Source: orlandosentinel.com

Danny-McBride,

Comedy,

Movies

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