In the name of Baby Billy, it’s time to rejoice!
During an interview for Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green tells us that even though The Righteous Gemstones Season 2 hasn't been released, HBO has picked up the fantastic series for a third season and they’re currently working on ideas now. As a huge fan of the pitch-black comedy, I couldn’t be more excited.
Created by Danny McBride, who also executive produces alongside Jody Hill and Gordon Green (the three of them previously made Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals), The Righteous Gemstones focuses on a deeply hypocritical family of mega-church pastors—Jesse (McBride), Eli (John Goodman), Kelvin (Adam Devine), and Judy (Edi Patterson). The series also stars Cassidy Freeman, Tony Cavalero, Tim Baltz, Greg Alan Williams, and Walton Goggins as Gemstone uncle Baby Billy.
In addition to telling me that they’re going to make a third season, David Gordon Green said they just wrapped filming on Season 2, calling the season “massive” and “an epic half-hour comedy unlike the world has seen,” and compared the experience of making the series to how he made the Halloween sequel.
Check out our exchange about the show below. If you missed our extended conversation about Halloween Kills it's loaded with good stuff.
COLLIDER: I love The Righteous Gemstones. So I kind of want to know what can you tease people about Season 2?
DAVID GORDON GREEN: Well, we just wrapped last week. I got off the phone with Danny this morning, because he's entering the edit room on the final couple of episodes, but we're in great shape for...I don't want to say when it's released because I think it's changed a couple of times. I'm not exactly sure what the latest is, but it's massive. It is an epic half-hour comedy unlike the world has seen. You'd read one thing on the page and then you'd show up and see these spectacular sets. It's so much fun as a juxtaposition to Halloween because it's the same crew, right? We jumped from these very economical 30 day shoot horror movies to these massive HBO spectacle comedies. It's just so different in every way, but you're with the same collaborators for the most part. You're looking over and seeing the same production designer, Richard Wright and Mike Simmons, our D.P. and camera department. It's just so fun to take these rides and have very different experiences, certainly very different outcomes. What I love is when the audiences do overlap somewhat.
Danny has said in the past that he envisioned this as something that could actually last. Typically the shows you make are only two seasons, is this something that you envision could last for a number of years?
GORDON GREEN: It's definitely Danny's brainchild and I'd leave that to him, but we've been picked up for a third and they want us to do another one. So we're cooking on ideas for that right now. It is so sprawling and epic with its ensemble. The shows we've done in the past are more or less on Danny's character shoulders. Here there's a lot more than just that. That's a great attribute of it, but it's, it's pretty expansive.
And like everything, I think our ambition, we always get into things. And once we realized how difficult it is, we think, why are we doing this? Then we realized it's because we can't ignore the opportunity of imagination. There's so many shows that I think find that comfort zone. This is our formula. This is our budget, and this is the story, and these are the characters and this is how it works. And we get to go home and have a normal life. We're just not that. We're just too crazy for that. So the second we get comfortable, we think what's next? What's bigger? What's badder? What's crazier? What's unexpected?
