Here Comes McBride
Kickin’ it with the star of ‘The Foot Fist Way’
By Brent Simon
Cusak Talks
'Hit Everybody With a Hammer'
Chinesee Outtake
For a 16mm movie shot in three weeks on a shoestring budget of credit card financing and $30,000 in savings, The Foot Fist Way has paid huge dividends for ascendant funnyman Danny McBride, even though it hasn’t grossed dollar one from audiences.
McBride first met his Foot Fist Way (opening May 30) collaborators, Jody Hill and Ben Best, at the North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2005, though known only for the supporting role of Bust-Ass in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls (2003), his sole feature film credit, McBride became the center of a comedy about a blustery, small town Tae Kwon Do instructor, Fred Simmons, who undergoes personal and professional turbulence when his wife starts to cheat on him and he finds out his idol, a preening competition champion turned movie star named Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (Best), isn’t all he’s imagined.
The movie was accepted into competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it was embraced by a legion of comedic heavyweights, among them Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Surprised it wasn’t acquired at the festival, the pair later snapped up the movie (via their Gary Sanchez Productions) for distribution through Paramount Vantage.
It’s had a long and winding path to release, but the movie quickly conferred “made man” status upon McBride, helping him land memorable supporting parts in Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid, Owen Wilson’s Drillbit Taylor, and two of this summer’s most highly anticipated comedies, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder.
“It’s been pretty insane,” says McBride of his at-once-quiet-and-quick career trajectory. “I live in Virginia, and every time I would come back out to L.A., I would suddenly hear of all these other people who had seen the film.
“When we were in college, we would just sit around and drink beer and watch the same movies over and over again,” McBride continues. “And when we made this film, we wanted it to be something that could have that sort of lifespan – something that some other guys in college would sit around and drink some beers to and enjoy. Now I’m running around with Will, and running from dinosaurs in Land of the Lost. It doesn’t seem real.”
Much like mentor Ferrell – with whom he’s currently shooting director Brad Silberling’s aforementioned adaptation of the 1970s TV series – McBride specializes in portraying charismatic blowhards, men emboldened by false or unearned confidence. In person, though, the Georgia-born McBride has a soft and completely unassuming nature that belies the tense, tightly wound nature of many of his characters. “Since I went to film school and have a writing and directing background, I think a lot of the stories I’m most interested in are about antiheroes, or people who audiences might not normally get behind,” he says.
A canted, slow-burn comedy of very personalized turmoil, The Foot Fist Way embodied those characteristics, especially since it unfolds against such a mock-serious backdrop. “The fascinating thing about Tae Kwon Do that a lot of people don’t know is that it’s only useful against other people who know Tae Kwon Do,” jokes McBride, who says he enjoyed “the idea of a strip-mall dojo instructor dispensing the wisdom of this ancient martial art to kids that are basically [there for] after-school day care.”
While the film’s mouthful of a title (the literal translation of Tae Kwon Do) presents its own potential commercial hurdle, McBride, for one, hopes folks get it wrong. “I just love the idea of people butchering it, like The Fist Fudge Way,” he says.
Either way, this summer is sure to raise his profile. McBride is then set to tap back into his Southern roots, playing a character in some ways slightly reminiscent of Fred Simmons; he’ll reunite with his Foot Fist Way cohorts on the tentatively titled Eastbound and Down, an HBO comedy about a fallen baseball hero who returns to his small hometown to try to find some answers in his life. “I said, ‘I don’t think you can name a TV show after the theme song of Smokey and the Bandit, but we’ll try it,’” says McBride with a shrug and a smile.
Published: 05/21/2008
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