Actor Danny McBride is a pro wrestling fan and the star has been able to display that appreciation through his work on a few of his HBO television shows.
McBride, whom many know as Eastbound & Down‘s Kenny Powers, spoke with Garrett Martin of Paste as he promoted season two of the comedy The Righteous Gemstones. McBride plays the role of Jesse Gemstone, the son of famed megachurch pastor Eli Gemstone who is portrayed by John Goodman. An episode in the second season shows Eli as a southern territory pro wrestler back in the 1960s.
McBride thought that the “promotion” of pro wrestling tied quite heavy into how Gemstone markets his Evangelical congregation. Both McBride and producer Jody Hill are from North Carolina and grew up in the thick of southern territory wrestling. McBride talked about his love for one particular territory in the south: Jerry Jarrett’s Memphis Wrestling.
“I’ve always been fascinated by that era of wrestling, Memphis in particular,” McBride said. “I always thought it was such a cool time period. Just all these characters being born and how that evolved into what modern wrestling is. So it’s always been an area I’ve wanted to set a story in, and it just so happened that it kind of fit into what we wanted to do here.”
“It was always a concept that I had flirted with that I thought was part of [Eli’s] story,” he explained. “I feel like the union of Aimee Leigh [the Gemstone matriarch, who’s played by Jennifer Nettles in flashbacks] and Eli, Eli comes from kind of a more rough and tumble background. Didn’t have a lot of resources and had to do what he had to do to get by. And Aimee Leigh came from an area where she was a child star, and she had things that Eli didn’t, and it was the union of those two backgrounds that created this world. So we always had an idea that Eli in his past was kind of a gangster. And that’s how he runs his operation, too.”
This isn’t the first time McBride tipped the cap to pro wrestling. Will Ferrell’s character on Eastbound & Down was a clear homage to Jim Crockett Promotions era Ric Flair and Kenny Powers, while pitching in Mexico, came out to Hulk Hogan’s “Real American” theme.
If you’d like to continue those ties to Memphis Wrestling, then no better person to visit is Jeff Jarrett who did an exclusive interview with WrestleZone earlier in the week.
