SPOILER ALERT: The story includes mild spoilers from the Season 4 premiere of HBO‘s The Righteous Gemstones.
The Righteous Gemstones fans tuning in for the Season 4 premiere may be doing a double take or checking the menu to make sure they’ve got the right show as Danny McBride‘s HBO televangelist comedy kicked off its final season in an unexpected fashion — by traveling back to 1862 with none of the series’ cast in sight.
Titled Prelude, the 43-minute season opener plays like a Civil War movie — graphic violence included — with a surprise leading man, Bradley Cooper, playing a Gemstone ancestor. He carries the entire episode, which chronicles his character’s journey from a scheming, unscrupulous crook who would do anything for money — including kill people and pretend to be a pastor and join a Confederate unit as a Chaplain — to redemption. As the episode’s official logline puts it, “a case of divine intervention changes the sinner’s path for good” — and also charts the Gemstones’ career path for the next century and a half.
The episode is a reminder that before he became a movie star with the success of The Hangover, Cooper was a TV one and even headlined his own series, the short-lived Fox comedy Kitchen Confidential. He has largely stayed away from TV since, and this marks his biggest role in a decade that may land him his first Emmy nomination to go with five Oscar acting noms to date.
During a panel after The Righteous Gemstones‘ March 5 premiere screening featuring the show’s main cast, McBride spoke of the risk they took by starting the final season after a 21-month break with a standalone, period episode and explained how Cooper got to star in it.
“I knew it would be a tough role because this show is obviously an ensemble,” he said. “There are so many incredible actors here that the audience is showing up for, and to invite the audience back after the show’s been off for a little bit and to show up and not be any of these beautiful faces, it just had to be somebody who was more beautiful than all of us.”
McBride recalled discussing with his Rough House producing partner and fellow Gemstones EP Brandon James, “who’s the type of person to go to for this.”
“It was like, it needs to be somebody that has some real charisma and charm to pull off this turn with this character, someone that the audience won’t mind going on this journey with, and somebody that can hold the entire thing on their own shoulders. And I think I just threw away, flippantly, somebody like Bradley Cooper. And Brandon was like, well, we should just ask him.”
They sent Cooper the script; he responded very quickly to say that he was interested and wanted to do it.
“What was interesting is he had actually never seen Gemstones before, and then he didn’t want to watch it until we were done shooting, because he didn’t want to have it influence his performance, which I thought was was pretty smart,” McBride said. “Surprisingly, I think he feels like a Gemstone regardless of him not seeing you beforehand.”
Star Adam DeVine, who plays Kelvin Gemstone, shared his surprise when he got the Prelude script.
“I couldn’t believe that we weren’t in the first episode,” he said. “And then when Danny told me they got Bradley Cooper, I’m like, maybe he does the rest of the season.”
That won’t happen, and Kelvin and the rest of the dysfunctional Gemstone family (in the present) will back next week.
The fourth and final season of The Righteous Gemstones airs Sundays at 10 PM on HBO and Max.
Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.
