Danny McBride Thinks Men Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Movies

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**David Marchese** (0:42)
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese.
Danny McBride's great HBO shows, I'm talking about Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones, all of which he co-starred in and helped to create, weren't just satirically sharp, hilariously profane, and sneakily heart-tugging. They also worked as almost anthropologically detailed studies of a certain type of modern American manhood. McBride's anti-heroes in all of those shows were arrogant, insecure, unapologetic, vulgar, status-obsessed, and nursed all kinds of petty grievances. They were also widely beloved. Now, he's applying his gift for satire and character studies to short stories, with his first book, The Forthcoming Collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. Some of the stories fit pretty neatly into the McBride canon of wounded men who lash out, a canon that also includes his work co-writing the rebooted Halloween horror films. Other stories tip toward a quieter emotional depth, albeit a depth still laced with obscenity and the occasional violent outburst. But they're all undeniably the work of a storyteller interested in entertaining, while also poking at what makes men tick and then go boom. Here's my conversation with Danny McBride.
Danny, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today, I appreciate it.

**Danny McBride** (2:11)
Oh, thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.

**David Marchese** (2:13)
You know, reading the stories in the book, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, you know, to me, they feel like they are very much Danny McBride stories, they only could have come from you. There's the specific use of language, obviously the sense of humor, even sort of like the explosions of violence here and there. Kind of, you know what I'm talking about.
But the overarching themes of the book, they speak, to my mind, very clearly to one of the great themes of this moment, right? Which is, you know, what people call like a crisis of masculinity. Do you have a sense of why that feels like a particularly acute problem now?

**Danny McBride** (2:55)
I mean, maybe it's because everyone says that there's something wrong with men now.
But, you know, I don't know, I think it's probably, you know, maybe it's even that we're this generation that's like grown up so heavily on media. You know, I mean, like being a kid and growing up in the 80s, it's like you are 100% being sold machismo, action, kill them all, let God sort them out. Like that was sort of pounded into anyone's brains that came up on cable television or, you know, watching movies. And I think it took me a little while to realize when I got older, like, oh, shit, the movies are just that's not really real life. That's not really how things work. And maybe there is just this kind of slow waking of like, yeah, I guess everything I've been told isn't necessarily how it's supposed to be or how it goes. And then it's kind of that awkwardness of you sort of then finding out what is important to you or how, what your values are, what your morals are, what kind of person you want to be.

**David Marchese** (3:52)
There's one story called The Institute of Men, which is about a guy who goes to like sort of a creepy hair growth clinic and he has to take this intake survey that has some pretty, for what he thought was a medical procedure, some sort of strangely emotionally direct questions. I want to ask you a couple of those questions.

**Danny McBride** (4:12)
Okay. Wow, how clever of you. Here we go.

**David Marchese** (4:18)
One of the questions was, when was the last time you were in a physical altercation?

**Danny McBride** (4:24)
It was a long time ago. It was in, I feel like it might have been 2000 I got into a scuffle with an ex-girlfriend's boyfriend who was being abusive, and I went to go pick her up, and I got into a fight in the middle of Burbank.