It’s very exciting to hear that you’re working on another HBO series, with The Righteous Gemstones.

McBRIDE: Yeah, we’re really stoked. We just finished shooting the pilot, about two weeks ago, and we turn it into HBO next week, so hopefully they’ll go ahead and kick this sucker into high gear, and then we’ll jump into shooting this thing, at the beginning of next year. We’re stoked about it. I directed the pilot, and then Jody [Hill] and David [Gordon Green] will be back for the rest of the series. It was awesome. We had a killer time. We have a good cast, and we’re really excited about it. I hope HBO is, too.

What led you to want to do this? Have you always been curious about televangelists or was there a specific one that made you want to tell this story?

McBRIDE: I grew up in the South and I went to church, when I was a kid. My mom was in puppet ministry, and I grew up in a pretty religious household. When my parents got divorced, when I was in middle school, we found ourselves dedicating so much of our lives to the church. My mom was a single mom, raising me and my sister, and we went back to the church that we grew up in and found that people had turned their backs on my mom. They didn’t like the idea that she got a divorce, and they weren’t there to help us. I remember that being an early lesson, when I was young. It’s not that the messages I got in church were bad, but the way that some of the people at this church were using it as a way to make themselves better than other people, it put a chip on my shoulder, from an early age, that I’ve carried with me to my adult life. So, I’ve always secretly wanted to tell that story.

Who are the Gemstones then, and how would you say your character fits into the family?

McBRIDE: The Gemstones are basically a family of world famous televangelists. That was really the main piece of this. This isn’t a hit-piece on religion. With all the shows that we do, it’s always about characters, their relationships to their profession, and how they can use their profession to assume a certain level of respect or power that comes with that. If Gamby can think he’s a ruling king because he’s the principal of the school, or Kenny Powers thinks that because he played baseball than he’s better than everyone else around him, that’s what this is, too. This is a family of world famous televangelists and they do missions, all over the world. They bring in 17,000 people, weekly, to their gigantic mega-church. They pull in a ton of money and are far, far removed from their humble beginnings, when they started. Now, the family has suffered a loss. The mother has passed away, so you meet this family at a moment of crisis, where they’re trying to figure out how things got so far off the rails.