There’s a stunning transformation that happens to Edi Patterson when she puts on the aggressively curly-haired wig for her character on The Righteous Gemstones.
“Something different happens to the makeup of my atoms, once I get Judy’s hair on,” Patterson says in this episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “Because I do really feel like she’s a living person who’s inside of me, and I just get to unleash her and turn it up.” Without the wig, the Groundlings alum is nearly unrecognizable—and her real-life persona is far less unhinged than the sex-crazed evangelical Christian she plays on The Righteous Gemstones, which just began its fourth and final season on HBO.
Patterson, who also writes for the show, discusses keeping the season premiere’s massive cameo a secret, her alternative casting idea for that episode, getting “weird” with guest star Megan Mullally later in the season, and how Judy and her on-screen siblings—series creator Danny McBride and Adam Devine—have evolved over time. She also looks back on her very brief experience as a writer on Saturday Night Live, the shocking line she ad-libbed during her original audition with McBride for their previous show Vice Principals, and what it’s really like to improvise opposite Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Before—spoiler alert!—Bradley Cooper was cast as the surprise lead of The Righteous Gemstones’ Civil War-set final season premiere, Patterson had a very different idea for the episode. “I had in my head that it would be so dope if the cast of the Civil War episode was all of us,” she says, including her and the other women in the cast playing male soldiers, “and we just didn’t comment on it.”
“Everything in me was convinced this is the way to do this, like an ensemble theater company,” Patterson explains. She told the rest of the writing team, “People are gonna flip, they’ll love it!” But after seeing what McBride pulled off as director of the episode, she adds, “I would just like to go on the record as saying, I was not right on that one, this version with Bradley Cooper in it is the best version.”
McBride talked about casting Cooper on The Watch podcast this week, explaining that since the main cast would not be in the first episode, “We had to find someone who had enough charisma, enough charm, and enough appeal that people wouldn’t be turned off, but would be intrigued when he showed up.”
Patterson reveals that before he was cast on the show, Cooper had not only never seen a single episode of The Righteous Gemstones but also didn’t want to watch it before filming. “Once he knew he was doing it, he didn’t want to have it in his head that he was sort of trying to be like us,” she explains. “But I’m sort of blown away by how much he is like a Gemstone.”
Flashing back to the Gemstone siblings’ con-man ancestor in the first episode helps set up a final season that shows a deepening of the characters who could be full-on caricatures of mega-church grifters, but are brought more fully to life by the nuanced performances by Patterson and the rest of the cast.
“Hopefully, that’s the line we’re walking with the Gemstones all the time,” Patterson says. “Yes, they’re insane narcissist maniacs, but they’re doing their best.”
Nearly every journalist who has interviewed Patterson over the past several years notes just how different she seems, and even looks, in real life compared to her over-the-top character on the show.
“I’ve thought about this, and I honestly think it’s a couple of things,” Patterson tells me. “I think a huge part of it is the wig, because there’s something about my face that completely changes with any wig I put on.” She has “personified” the intensely curly wig she wears as Judy, referring to it by name as “Judes,” and feels as though some “weird magic” happens when she puts it on.
“There’s something about putting on Judes that just instantly is such a cool turbo water slide into the way my body moves, and the way my voice sounds, and the way my head will jerk,” she says. It’s like her “DNA morphs” and she is able to channel this insecure middle child with a “hole in her heart” who constantly needs to prove that she’s as worthy in the eyes of both her father (John Goodman) and God as her two brothers.
McBride conceived the role of Judy Gemstone with Patterson in mind after she auditioned as a relative unknown and got cast as what ended up being one of the lead roles in his previous HBO series Vice Principals. In that same podcast interview this week, McBride said that from the “very first scene” he shared with Patterson on Vice Principals, “she was just making me laugh so much” that he ended up expanding her character far beyond what had been planned and changing “the entire ending of the show” to make her character a central part of the story.
When it came time to put together Gemstones, McBride asked Patterson to join the writers’ room and be a big part of the creative process from the start. “That was the beginning of a massive change in my life,” she says now, adding that she’s “grateful to that dude forever.”
The experience over four seasons has taught Patterson to “trust” herself in new ways, she explains. “Danny has such a great sense of specificity and uniqueness. And I think it’s just taught me to lean into all the weird of me.”
Now that the show that changed her life and career is coming to an end, Patterson is still grappling with the “bittersweet” nature of saying goodbye. “There was a little window where it was nothing but crushing sadness to me,” she admits. She even asked McBride, “Why would we not keep doing this? It’s going great, we have a blast, and we love each other!” But she ultimately understood it’s better to “go out with a bang” and leave fans “wanting more” instead of overstaying their welcome.
“Once my tantrum child brain saw the truth of that, now I’ve just got nothing but off-the-charts gratitude that we got to do this for four seasons with these people,” Patterson adds, specifically citing fellow improviser Tim Baltz, who plays her husband BJ, as an exceptional scene partner. “I just feel the luckiest. It was the greatest.”
Plus, she already has plans for another TV collaboration with McBride, possibly expanding a movie idea they’ve been discussing for years in which she would play the overbearing mother of a child actor. “I know that I definitely want to keep working with Danny,” she says. “And if he wants to work with me, I’m 100% of the time a yes. He probably doesn’t even need to tell me what it is and I would say yes.”
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