Danny McBride

Danny McBride is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer whose career has centered on abrasive characters, boastful behavior, and unexpectedly vulnerable emotions. He was born on December 29, 1976, in Statesboro, Georgia, and studied at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

His breakthrough arrived with The Foot Fist Way, a low-budget 2006 film he co-wrote with director Jody Hill and Ben Best. McBride plays Fred Simmons, an incompetent tae kwon do instructor in a North Carolina community. The film premiered at Sundance in 2006 and attracted attention from HBO executives there.

That attention led to Eastbound & Down, which debuted on HBO in 2009. McBride co-created it with Hill and Best, and played Kenny Powers, a former Major League Baseball pitcher who returns home after his career collapses. Kenny's swagger, profanity, racism, and insecurity made him a memorable television antihero character.

After Eastbound & Down ended in 2013, McBride continued collaborating with Hill. He co-created Vice Principals with Hill and played Neal Gamby, a volatile high-school administrator competing for a principal's job. The HBO comedy ran for two seasons, from 2016 to 2017, and presented Gamby's aggression alongside loyalty and change.

In 2019, he launched The Righteous Gemstones, another HBO series he created, wrote, and executive-produced. He stars as Jesse Gemstone, the eldest son in a wealthy televangelist family whose ministry is undermined by greed, vanity, and scandal. John Goodman plays Eli; Adam DeVine and Edi Patterson play Kelvin and Judy.

McBride has also worked extensively in studio films. He appeared as Red in Pineapple Express (2008), directed by David Gordon Green, and as Cody, a pyrotechnics expert, in Tropic Thunder (2008). Further credits include Due Date, This Is the End, Alien: Covenant, and The Disaster Artist, showing range clearly onscreen.

Green became a major creative partner in McBride's film work. Together they co-wrote and produced the 2018 Halloween revival, which returned Michael Myers to Haddonfield and ignored the continuity of most earlier sequels. McBride also co-wrote its sequels Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), while Green directed three films.

Across these projects, McBride has made a recognizable comic persona without relying on one identical role. Kenny Powers is a disgraced athlete; Jesse Gemstone is a privileged preacher; Neal Gamby is an angry educator. His writing places men inside institutions that reward bravado, then exposes their mistakes through comedy often.