Danny McBride is an Executive Producer and co-creator (with Jody Hill) of the HBO comedy Vice Principals which airs every Sunday at 10:30PM. Yesterday at the Cable portion of the Television Critics Association Press Tour, the cast and creators spoke a bit about the series, and McBride talked about the research he did to bring his character, Neal Gamby, to life.
“I actually did go around to a few different high schools around the country and actually interviewed different assistant principals,” McBride revealed. “I didn’t tell them what it was in reference for, but just trying to get a beat on what the mentality is of somebody who is in that position and what the outlook is.”
“Talking to different vice principals, there’s — you know, it’s just interesting,” he continued. “There’s different ways to handle discipline. There’s a way where you try to, you know, talk a student into understanding why they’ve done this; and then there’s a way to just sort of rule with an iron fist. In doing that, it helped us, sort of, figure out who these two vice principals are, which method each of these guys would use, and how using a method like that would affect the rest of your life,” he explained.
“That kind of broke down into Neal Gamby being this guy who thinks things should get changed by having an iron fist, and that sort of mentality has separated him from everyone else in this life. It’s giving him a tough relationship with his daughter, with his ex-wife, and Lee Russell, who is someone who kind of uses words and teases things out and keeps his ambitions kind of behind the scenes, you know. That was a way to deal with students. And that kind of trickery has kind of landed him in a position in his life where he’s not a hundred percent honest with how his life looks or how happy he is,” McBride reflected.
You can see Danny McBride’s Gamby aside Walton Goggins and his other co-stars in a trailer for the new episode of Vice Principals airing tonight:
