As it barrels through its characteristically outlandish fourth and final season, Danny McBride’s HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones has cemented a reputation for itself. Yes, it’s side-splittingly funny. Yes, its “failchildren of a crumbling empire” narrative is surprisingly relevant. Yes, there is a core of sincerity at the center of the madness. But Gemstones’ legacy wouldn’t be complete without talking about the bold ways McBride and co. spend the budget on ridiculous props and movie-level set pieces. It’s the best-looking comedy on television because of the care put into the details of the production, and because you see every single dollar on the screen.
Season 4 has continued that tradition with aplomb, opening with a Civil War flashback episode that included a long, chaotic battle sequence edited to look like one extended take. It’s one of the biggest action pieces on TV this year so far, and involved 100 background actors, 20 reenactors, 13 stunt performers, and 12 horseback wranglers. (McBride is happy to hold up the HBO “big battle” mantle until Game of Thrones prequel series A Knight of Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight premieres later this year.)
But the second episode upped the ante even more, as the core Gemstones (McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam DeVine) were strapped to jetpacks and sent flying around the cavernous North Charleston Coliseum & Performing Arts Center. The scene is one of the best examples yet of the Gemstone childrens’ ostentatious excess — they are ostensibly holding an event to honor the legacy of their late mother, but instead, of course, make it all about them. There’s an easily imagined scenario where the entire stunt was green screened on ground level, but instead Gemstone flew three cast members as high as 50 feet in the coliseum, with stunt performers used for the most dangerous parts, to capture the high-wire act.
It was a big challenge for supervising stunt coordinator Cory DeMeyers (Rebel Ridge) and his stunt team. While he had never worked on a jetpack sequence before, his wirework experience as a stuntman and time spent shooting a similar (but ultimately reshot) sequence in Netflix’s Project Power made him confident in what to do. Along with director Jody Hill and VFX supervisor Bruce Branit, the first step: sitting down with a bunch of G.I. Joes and choreographing the sequence with the toy soldiers.
“It [helped us] come up with the concept of like, OK, how are we going to do this?” DeMeyers told Polygon. “What is the actual performance? Are they rising together? Opposite, spinning, changing position?”
After briefly considering using real jetpacks (“more trouble than it was worth”) and green screens (“not the vibe”), the team settled on a classic, but taxing practical stunt approach: 13 different wire rigs, two high-speed winches from a team that works with Cirque du Soleil, old school hand-operated stunt lines, and over 7,000 feet of tech line weaved around the 100-foot-tall coliseum. In all, DeMeyers and his team had three weeks of rigging, testing, and rehearsing — a blessing in the fast-paced world of television shooting.
“I do not know how I got our [Unit Production Manager] and our line producer to agree to that,” DeMeyers says. “In television, it never really feels like you have enough time. But [the Gemstones team] are trying to give you as much time as they can while still allowing every other department to put as much on screen as possible. They’re very much about making sure everybody has what they need to be successful.”
The Civil War battle from the first episode helped DeMeyers execute within the time he had — the two sequences were shot “back-to-back, with a couple of days in between.” That meant he could bring the rigging team to Charleston early to help with some of that sequence, before sending them to the coliseum to get started scouting and wiring the place. But the design of the coliseum itself — and the necessities for filming an evangelical extravaganza there — posed its own problems.
“They’re rigging for a rock-and-roll/television show with their lighting setups,” DeMeyers says. “So now we have 7,000 feet of line that we have to put up in the air. We have to be able to fly our actors 50 feet up at times and our stunt people 50 feet up at times, but we also have to fly them like 75, 80 feet across the entire coliseum. And so how do you do that when you have 150 lights on grids up in the air?”
The answer: color-coded rigs (to keep all 13 of them straight), and some old-fashioned theater tricks. Because the majority of the jetpack sequence has Danny McBride’s character flying higher than the other two in the middle, with Adam Devine and Edi Patterson level on either side of him, the team set up one system for both Devine and Patterson, and a different one for McBride. But the team only had two winches, instead of four. With two, you can control flight in two dimensions, while four allows you to move in three. Since the characters were flying both vertically and horizontally, that’s where the theater techniques came in: Counterweights and strong arms.
“We put the winches on one axis, and then we operated hand lines with counterweights the same way they used to do it in stage productions,” he explains. “So up and down might be on counterweights and a stuntman on a line helping you travel upwards smoothly on this counterbalance system. But forward would be programmed speed, and timing would be on the high speed winch, or vice versa.”
An unexpected wrinkle for DeMeyers and the stunt team was the Gemstones’ ostentatious costuming. There are a few different outfits they wear during the flying sequences, including extravagant angel wings and astronaut outfits. The astronaut suits were easy, but the wings were a “pain in the butt.” In rehearsals, the team used makeshift wings made out of PVC pipes and foam to recreate the right size, but they realized later the weight was off and had to make late adjustments to account for the approximate 50 pounds of weight from the jetpack prop (made by production designer Richard Wright’s team, complete with lights and fans inside) and the costumes.
While stunt performers were used for the crashes, McBride, Devine, and Patterson (the only one of the trio without prior harness-flying experience in her career) did “most of our flying,” DeMeyers says, including moments where they send the actors flying towards walls to get their genuine reactions (stopping them just before impact, of course, with stunt performers swapping in for that part). That includes the final shot of the episode, where McBride flies “50 to 75 feet up in the air” towards a hanging disco ball — he did the flying himself.
“All three of them — Danny, Adam, and Edi — were just champions in that sequence,” he says. “They were nervous for sure, but we brought them in for a rehearsal day beforehand and gave them an opportunity to fly a little bit.
“You can make people as comfortable as possible in a harness, and a day might be all right, but when you’re in that harness testing for an entire day and then shooting for two or three days […] And they weren’t just flying in harnesses for three, four days. They were also carrying an additional 50 pounds while doing it. And that doesn’t necessarily feel the best, but it looked amazing and we accomplished everything we set out to accomplish and it was safe, and I think it looks good.”
One of the most important elements for the team to get right was the jetpacks crashing during the Gemstones’ rehearsals, because it was a unique opportunity to recreate where real jetpack technology is at right now. The programmable winches use a node-based program (“like you were editing a slow motion timeline”) that allowed the team to be exact with the way jetpacks can sputter and sway.
“We’ve all seen jetpacks now,” he says. “They really exist in our world, and if you watch ‘em, they don’t necessarily fly the way that you had imagined them when you were a kid.”
During the jetpack sequence, McBride’s character bowls into a group of dancers, hitting one directly in the back with his helmet. The performer hit, MaryGrace Colburn, was a first-time stunt performer — a former dancer who had worked on the show as a PA and had talked to DeMeyers about getting into stunts. (It’s not uncommon on the show: DeMeyers says the crew are encouraged to try out other jobs they’re interested in.) This was her first real opportunity, and she did so well that it put a serious scare into her coordinator.
“She took the hardest hit out of all the girls, and it was her first job ever,” he beams. “From the audience, I was standing back watching the whole thing, and she sold it so well, I thought she bounced her face off the ground. I was like, Oh my God, we killed MG. She broke her nose. This is her first job. She’s never going to want to do stunts again. And one of our other girls starts to crawl over to her and check on her. And their acting was so good, because as soon as they called cut, both girls jumped up with the biggest smiles on their faces and high fived each other and were stoked.”
That spirit of collaboration and giving everyone their time to shine is a big part of what makes Gemstones special, especially because it runs so counter to the instincts of the characters within the show. And as episode 2’s jetpack sequence showed, when you work like that, the sky’s the limit — or maybe, a disco ball is.
New episodes of The Righteous Gemstones air Sunday nights on HBO.
