King of Summer: Danny McBride
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ENTERTAINMENT
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The Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder star has been smuggling laughs on the DL for a while now. This summer, his racket has finally broken into the big time.
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 Was it your grand plan to own summer 2008?
I started this about 10 years ago. Now it's 2008—this is when we attack. [Laughs] It's really weird... We shot Foot Fist Way in 2005. It didn't come out because Gary Sanchez's [Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's production company] deal was lost in paperwork for two years. And we shot Pineapple last March, so we couldn't have predicted it. I feel like I'm in the winning seat. I got Tropic and Pineapple, and both those movies are two of the most badass R-rated comedies to come out this year.
The Foot Fist Way was championed early on by Ferrell and McKay. How did they get involved with it?
We went to Sundance with the film and got U.K. distribution, but not domestic. So when we got back to L.A., we just went about our lives. The movie was being passed around, and Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] wanted to meet me the next day on the set of Knocked Up. I was like, "Oh shit, that's crazy!" Then I get a call that Will and Adam started a production company and wanted to push our film and distribute it. It was mind-blowing. At that point, you're just waiting for the floor to drop. It was insane.
You play a karate instructor in Foot Fist, and have a knock-down, drag-out fight with Seth Rogen and James Franco in Pineapple. Which was more taxing?
Foot Fist was crazy 'cause we made it for nothing. It was 18 days straight, and I'm busting my hand open breaking boards, so there was definitely injuries there. But the fight scene in Pineapple is just insane. It was a week of shooting, and Franco hit me with a bong and split my head open. There were definitely more bruises, but there was also a paycheck, so that kinda nurses the wounds. There was no paycheck with Foot Fist. So you look at yourself with bruises like an asshole who just did something for nothing.
 They don't make breakaway stunt bongs?
They do. It was candy glass, but it was filled with water, so it just added a little weight to it and cracked my head right open.
Slight spoiler: Your character in Pineapple—Red—proves to be essentially unkillable. To what do you attribute his resilience?
I don't know. He has this weird ability to shift his vital organs. It's funny. It's pretty crazy to watch the movie with the audience and they get excited when he comes back. It is just weird.
For a film like Pineapple Express, or even Tropic Thunder, how much is in the script and how much do you guys just come up with on the spot?
With Pineapple, we improved a lot, which is cool. Because a lot of times when you improv, with the writers there, you feel guilty. But on Pineapple, it's cool because Seth is there and he wrote it and he's not saying what's on the page, so you think that you don't have to either. The diner scene at the end…there wasn't even a script for that. In Tropic, even though it's huge and there was a lot of choreographed stuff with all the extras and helicopters and planes and stuff, Ben [Stiller] still wanted us to improv and keep things loose. It seems that anyone who works in comedy is smart and will open themselves up to that.
Most of your scenes in Tropic Thunder involve Nick Nolte. We don't really have a question about that. Just…Wow.
It was pretty "wow." The first time I met him I'm just like, "I'm a big fan of yours." And he's like, "Is that so?" But he is the nicest guy. I had a fucking blast working with him. He is a wild man. And just to watch him—a lot of times I forget my lines 'cause I'm watching Nick Nolte. But yeah, it was a pretty awesome way to spend the summer.
Did you know going in that you were going to spend most of the shoot in a prison camp chained to a pole with Nolte?
Yeah. I was like, "I'll take the role!" [Laughs]
 Who was the biggest diva on the set?
I think the conditions were so shitty on Tropic—we were way up in the mountains with mud and tons of shit—there wasn't as much diva as you would imagine. There was [Robert] Downey [Jr.], [Jack] Black, Nolte—we were all there for months taking in all the shit. Now Ben did take a helicopter to work every now and then. I don't know if that is considered diva or just like he has the power. [Laughs]
Your next movie is Land of the Lost, right?
Yeah. I just finished shooting that.
Is that going to be a gritty slice of realism like the original TV show?
It is definitely a comedy when you have Will Ferrell running from a T.rex. They really kept the spirit of the show; they just took what was in the show and put Will Ferrell in it. The sets that they built, just the scale of the movie is incredible. With Pineapple, there's this kind of action with this kind of comedy, and it's the same with Tropic Thunder—it's the scope of a war movie with a comedy. That's kind of what Land of Lost is—it's the scope of a huge special effect extravaganza, but you still have the riffing and the improv.
What do you have brewing of your own? Any smaller projects like Foot Fist?
The guys I made Foot Fist with, we just sold a show to HBO. We're writing that now, and we're gonna shoot it next year. I wrote a screenplay called Your Highness. It is kind of what Shaun of the Dead did with zombie movies, but it's like an '80s fantasy film. This will be our version of Krull. We even want to use the old-school special effects, so it's one of those movies.
Awesome. And what's the HBO show?
It's called East Bound and Down, but that's a tentative title. It's about a major league pitcher who looses his fast ball and we catch up with him a few years after his fall from grace. It is about his weird quest to get back the heat.
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