SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the Season 4 premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones,” now streaming on Max.
For the final season premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones,” the HBO comedy that chronicles a fictional family of megachurch pastors in South Carolina, creator and star Danny McBride knew he had to nail the casting. “Gemstones” had done episode-length flashbacks before, but always with younger versions of characters we already know, like patriarch Eli (John Goodman) or siblings Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine). Season 4, by contrast, begins over 150 years in the past and stays there for nearly 40 minutes.
“I knew it was going to be a tall order,” McBride told Variety at the season premiere event earlier this week. “Fans have waited over a year for the new season, and it was tricky to write an episode where none of the cast is in the show.” (McBride co-wrote the episode with fellow executive producers John Carcieri and Jeff Fradley.) To play Elijah Gemstone, a ne’er-do-well who gets swept up in the Civil War and inaugurates the family tradition of religious hypocrisy, the “Gemstones” team needed a guest star whose magnetism would more than compensate for the lack of typical family antics.
“My pie-in-the-sky pick would be someone like Bradley Cooper,” McBride said. Having broken out as the star of “The Hangover” franchise, Cooper is no stranger to lewd, outrageous comedy. But he’s also pivoted to prestige projects in recent years, directing himself in the Oscar-nominated films “Maestro” and “A Star Is Born” — and until McBride sent Cooper the script for the episode, titled “Prelude,” the actor had never previously watched the show. McBride called Cooper accepting the role anyway “a little bit of a miracle,” in keeping with the show’s evangelical themes.
Toward the end of “Prelude,” Elijah experiences a miracle of his own. But first, he visits the church of Virginia pastor Abel Grieves (Josh McDermitt), who extols “state’s rights” in his sermon and collects donations from congregants already strained by the ongoing war. “Don’t seem very righteous to me,” Elijah drawls. He then shoots Abel, steals the donations and pockets Abel’s gold-plated Bible before some Confederate recruiters arrive on the scene. Once Elijah learns chaplains are paid a princely sum of $50 a week, he hastily mauls Grieves’ corpse with the collection plate, fakes his own death and assumes the preacher’s identity.
Elijah may present as a man of God, but it’s not a convincing front. He drinks and gambles, then tells a suspicious soldier he could go to Hell for questioning his character in a decidedly Jesse Gemstones-esque tone. His idea of consoling a dying man is “go be with Him…well, I think that’s it, I guess!” In lieu of an inspiring homily, he tells his audience to “quit competing with God and just do your best.”
McBride wanted to cast Cooper in part because he could give Elijah a roguish appeal that endures despite all this. “With ‘Gemstones,’ all these actors that are involved in it — there has to be a level of charisma and charm, because these characters are doing such despicable things,” he said. “If you cast someone who’s too dark or doesn’t have charm, it can be a little hard to watch. That’s the tightrope we always walk with ‘Gemstones’: making sure it’s fun, even though you’re rooting for people who are, you know, kind of shitty.” Elijah is no exception, killing a man who recognizes him and stowing the corpse in an already-occupied coffin. Yet he always has Cooper’s signature glint in his eye, making it hard to root against his survival of a doomed campaign.
To pull off “Prelude,” though, “The Righteous Gemstones” also had to build the world around Elijah, staging bloody battles and crowded camps in less than 10 days of shooting. McBride grew up in Virginia — making Elijah’s origins a nod to his own — surrounded by Civil War lore. “When I was a kid, in my backyard I would find bullets and all sorts of artifacts,” he said. Bringing the era to life was a longtime dream, but doing so involved shooting almost entirely exterior scenes in the humid, rainy South. “It was a lot of bobbing and weaving and trying to make the most of our daylight,” McBride recalled. “Everything was a challenge.”
Even for a production used to staging musical numbers, motorcycle chases and monster truck rallies, “Prelude” breaks new ground. Which McBride said is the point: “It just lets the audience know not to expect anything this season — that anything can happen. We’re all trying to push ourselves creatively to deliver something that they haven’t seen before.” After all, the episode is the last first impression the show will ever have.
Elijah’s time in uniform comes to an ignominious end when the Union takes him prisoner. But as the skirmish rages around him, the thief, murderer and habitual drunk tries something new: he prays, sincerely and for himself alone. As if in answer, the Union captain finds his Bible and spares his life. Before he walks away a free man, Elijah prays with his former comrades, now staring down their execution. He hasn’t magically turned into a master orator, but his words ring truer than before. “They killed people because they had to,” he says of the soldiers. “I know that ain’t great, but it’s better than killing for money or out of meanness.” Once the deed is done, Elijah loads the corpses into the wagon and brings them back to the base, declaring God saved his life. He seems to believe it, because that night, he opens the gilded Bible and reads it from the beginning.
“Prelude” is an origin story for the Gemstone dynasty, but also the Gemstone mindset: a contradictory mix of acquisitive greed and deeply held faith that’s fascinated McBride and his contemporaries from the start. Before that disposition reached its opulent, late capitalist stage in the form of Christian resorts and “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers,” it was born on a battlefield, in service of a lost and destructive cause. Everyone’s a sinner — Elijah Gemstone and his descendants more than most.
Abby Lee contributed to this report.
