Danny McBride Is Taking on Modern Masculinity

As an actor, Danny McBride has specialized in incarnating particularly boorish and/or toxic specimens of masculinity on screen for more than 20 years. As a writer and television creator, McBride has specialized in skewering and dissecting those forms of masculinity. Remember, he didn’t just star in Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones — he also created or co-created all three shows.

Later this year, McBride is bringing another side of his writing into the foreground: as The Hollywood Reporter‘s Aaron Couch writes, Random House is set to publish a collection of McBride’s stories on June 23. That the title of this book is Thrilling Tales of Modern Men should give you a sense of what it’s all about. McBride told The Hollywood Reporter that he worked on these stories during his downtime betwen seasons of The Righteous Gemstones.

Publisher Random House’s description of the book includes some details of what readers can expect: “An amateur magician gets in way over his head with a deadly stunt in a local mall. A washed-up sitcom actor takes revenge on the coyote who killed his dog. Two young runaways decide to part ways, but not before embarking on one last big adventure.” All of these descriptions do indeed sound like summaries of McBride projects, which seems encouraging for longtime admirers of his onscreen work.

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“This collection takes place in the spaces men build for themselves when the world moves on without asking their permission,” McBride told The Hollywood Reporter. “These stories aren’t here to fix men. They’re here to watch them spiral out of control, eat shit, get back up, and occasionally do something accidentally decent.” That certainly sounds like the voice countless viewers have savored since Eastbound & Down debuted in 2009.

As for McBride’s own reading habits, he shared a few of his favorite reads with the website Shortlist in 2020. One of the authors he recommended there, Grady Hendrix, subsequently wrote the horror novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires — a book which, Deadline reported, McBride was adapting for HBO in 2024.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…