Spoilers follow for the sixth episode of the third season of The Righteous Gemstones, “For Out of the Heart Comes Evil Thoughts,†which premiered on HBO on July 16.Â
For nearly a year, The Righteous Gemstones director Jonathan Watson was asking questions that only a lengthy fight scene in which one of the combatants is fully naked can inspire. What prosthetic genitalia would need to be crafted? Which camera angles could hide the swap between the nude stuntman and the nude actor he was doubling? Would the stunt double need to be circumcised? Watson groans good-naturedly remembering these conversations. He had experience filming nudity before on the series Future Man, but the violent climax of “For Out of the Heart Comes Evil Thoughts†was a unique task that took months to coordinate and plan — and not exactly one Watson asked for.
“I came onto a Zoom late when Danny McBride was discussing assignments. I had a technical problem, and when I came on, he said, ‘I was just telling everyone that the person in this collective who should direct the naked-man fight is Jonathan Watson,’†Watson says with a laugh. “Knowing that I went to Catholic school, I think he just wanted to see me squirm.â€
There is squirming in the fight, and punching, kicking, brass knuckles, and broken furniture too. The Righteous Gemstones packs action sequences into each season, entangling the titular televangelist family and their absurdly outsize personalities in vehicular chases and shoot-outs. Yet the throw-down between clothed, mild-mannered optometrist BJ (Tim Baltz) and nude, braggadocious guitarist Stephen (Stephen Schneider) required both precise technicality to keep the actors and their stunt doubles safe, and nuanced performances from Baltz and Schneider to communicate the emotional devastation of their brawl, which pushes the normally kind BJ to “become the monster,†Watson says. The result is a giddily gross scene that’s viscous with blood and spit but tonally tragic, with two men in love with the same woman trying to assert their masculinity in a toxically destructive way.
It was key for the fight to reflect “that weird Righteous Gemstones tone,†as series creator McBride puts it, “where something can be funny and strange and fucked-up at the same time.†And he remembers exactly when he knew they had nailed it, after a challenging prep that included rewriting the scene’s ending and finding replacements for the original cinematographer and a stunt double days before filming: “The moment that I came on to the set and saw the stunt guy, naked, jump on top of stunt BJ and slam into the picture of the family with his naked ass, I was like, ‘Good. Watson’s moving this in the perfect direction.’â€
“It was always naked.â€
When The Righteous Gemstones writers’ room convened in fall 2021, they began work on a story line for BJ and wife Judy (Edi Patterson), who in season two bonded through their marriage, BJ’s baptism, and caring for Judy’s pregnant aunt. It was time to complicate the pairing and BJ’s unconditional love for the tempestuous, image-obsessed Judy, and McBride and episode co-writer and executive producer John Carcieri took inspiration from singer-on-the-road films like Walk the Line and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born adaptation. “She’s fulfilling this image that she has for what a rock star does, but as with all things with Judy, it’s wrongheaded and weird,†Carcieri says. “This punk who plays the guitar, who is a muse to this artist, that’s how Judy probably sees Stephen. Whether he is that guy or not, that’s probably how Stephen sees himself as well.â€
Stephen would be oppositional to BJ in nearly every way, from his vulgarity and detailed sex talk to his mid-aughts aesthetic with bleached tips and Ed Hardy–style outfits, and their confrontation would emphasize Stephen’s aggressiveness and obsession with Judy. “It was always naked. I remember a lot of jokes about that movie Eastern Promises,†Carcieri says. “BJ getting beat up by a naked man is another level of humiliation.â€
But as Carcieri and McBride wrote the scene’s action elements, they wanted it to feel dynamic and explosive, “not like the comedy version of a fight sceneâ€; the humor was primarily tied to the absurdity of Stephen’s prolonged nakedness, while the sparring would be sloppy and visceral. In Carcieri and McBride’s original version of their confrontation, which they shared with cast and crew in late spring 2022, Stephen would dominate BJ so fully that the latter “runs, scurries away,†McBride says.
BJ losing the “mid-jack-off†altercation, as McBride describes it, wasn’t an issue for Baltz, whose character had, over two seasons, been tased, punched, and shot. What was more difficult to prepare for was BJ’s personality shift once he learns that Judy has cheated on him, and his turn toward brother-in-law Jesse (played by McBride) for macho guidance that goes against his established nonviolence. “It’s something that poor, sweet BJ has not been subjected to until now,†Baltz says. “I’ve never had to have the character think that he has to be something else.â€
While Baltz absorbed that change, Schneider grappled with how naked he wanted to be. When he got the role, he confirmed his comfort wearing a prosthetic penis, but after Watson fully explained the fight scene, Schneider started to wonder if he should just go nude. Being trusted with the fight was a “badge of honor,†Schneider says, and the character’s clothesless-ness felt like a challenge he wanted to tackle for himself.
“We don’t have a ton of these things as we get older. When you’re a little kid, it’s like, can you go swim out to that and make it back? This was terrifying. That’s why I knew I had to try to do it, to try to overcome that kind of fear,†Schneider says. “To me, comedically, it feels like the most authentic and the most funny if I’m really just putting myself out there. So I gave them the go-ahead on that, and then I just began to panic for six fucking straight months.â€
“It’s gotta be non-pornographic, tasteful, and funny.â€
In McBride and Carcieri’s script, the fight was specifically planned. Having learned about Judy’s affair and gassed up by Jesse, BJ decides to ambush Stephen when the guitarist reaches out to Judy asking for one final hookup. He sneaks into Stephen’s house, finds him masturbating in a bedroom, and punches and spits on him, but is then totally overwhelmed by Stephen throwing him around inside and outside the house. The production set an early December date to film the scenes in the home — a location they needed to find — and scheduled the fight for the last day that Baltz and Schneider would be on set.
Anxiety settled in for both actors, who filmed other elements of “For Out of the Heart Comes Evil Thoughts†over the ensuing months. As Baltz and Schneider built a friendship off-screen to ease into hitting each other in the face in front of cameras, Watson got to work hammering down the details of the fight with supervising stunt coordinator Cory DeMeyers, with whom he had previously worked on Future Man. (“I remember telling him, ‘Jonathan, every time I work with you, we do nude stuff. I think this is a specialty of yours,’†DeMeyers says.) Whenever the pair got a few minutes on set in between Watson’s various second-unit-director duties and DeMeyers overseeing other stunts, including scenes with this season’s Redeemer monster truck, they shared ideas for the fight — like what if there was a latticelike structure for BJ to be thrown through? “It became much more elaborate,†Watson explains.
The production secured a house in Charleston’s Park Circle neighborhood in November, with a long hallway, as requested by Watson, so he could create the “horror movie walk†that BJ does through the house while listening to Kenny Rogers’s “Daytime Friends,†which Stephen considers his and Judy’s song. In their first of three walk-throughs, Watson and DeMeyers adapted the script to the home’s actual layout: “You have to reimagine the blocking. I played one character, he played the other character, and we step-by-stepped it through the house and found little moments,†DeMeyers says of how he and Watson added “special sauce†to what was already written. Stephen kicking BJ “Leonidas from 300†style into a wall got zhuzhed up by having BJ hit the corner of the wall and spin into a hallway; BJ getting thrown through a pony wall of wooden rails became more ruinous with the addition of a small table of knickknacks for him to bounce off of. “Stephen jumping on the bed and standing over BJ, the little girls watching afterward — all that stuff was Jonathan,†Carcieri says.
Once Watson and DeMeyers had divided up what the actors and stunt doubles would each handle, a later walk-through included director of photography Paul Daley, who advised on how to light the house’s interiors and exteriors and place the three cameras so that the fight was engaging without being obscene. Once Stephen and BJ start grappling, the cinematography primarily tracks their maneuvering, with full-length shots of Schneider that acknowledge his nudity but don’t emphasize certain parts of his anatomy.
“It’s gotta be non-pornographic, tasteful, and funny,†Daley says. “So we photographed it super-tastefully. When we prepped it, it was, We’re going to photograph the male nudity with a little bit of class. It’s not gross. It just happens to be a man with no clothes on.â€
Watson’s shot list was exceptionally detailed, with descriptions for each of the scene’s 50-plus frames. (They didn’t storyboard, Watson says, both because he “didn’t need it†and because he worried artist renderings of genitalia might be “a distraction … like these goofy, vulgar comics.â€) With a couple weeks before the December filming date, intimacy coordinator Zuri Pryor-Graves was on hand for Schneider’s comfort, and the prosthetics department crafted a penis for the masturbation shot and a set of testicles for when BJ grabs Stephen. Everything seemed ready to go, until McBride and Carcieri reworked the script right before the Thanksgiving break: What if instead of losing the fight, BJ won — but hated himself for it?
“To us, it became this more powerful story about, he can go in there and beat Stephen up, but it’s going to be an empty victory. He’s not going to feel good about it. It’s not going to heal the things that were wrong in his and Judy’s relationship,†Carcieri says. “It really became more of a story of him becoming this monster in that moment of rage, and then having to take a step back and look at himself and say, What have I become?â€
In the new version of the scene, instead of Stephen being enraged by BJ grabbing his testicles, he’s weakened by BJ’s late moment of aggression, and the fight’s momentum flips. In front of horrified neighbors, the bloodied BJ gets on top of Stephen and beats him with his fists like the ape smashing bones in 2001: A Space Odyssey; when he gets home, his “I hope you like me now†to Judy is resentful and remorseful, an adaptation of the “How you like me now?†boast he uses on Stephen before the fight.
“Jesse giving BJ a final line, and then kind of twisting it for his last line at the end, we slid in all of that when we changed the end of the fight,†McBride says. This reworking meant that a later, already-filmed meeting between Stephen, BJ, and Judy got scrapped. “Hopefully it’ll be on a deleted scenes or something,†says Carcieri.
But that wasn’t the only last-minute change to come.
“It’s not a victory emotionally. It’s a loss.â€
With the fight scheduled for a Monday and Tuesday in early December, the Friday before was devoted to final costume and set-design tweaks and choreography modifications. What no one expected, though, was that both Daley and Brian Hite, the stuntman booked to double Schneider, would suddenly become unavailable (the former because of COVID; the latter because of a scheduling change). Those unforeseen callouts sent Watson and DeMeyers scrambling, but they found replacements close to home in DP Brandon Trost, who worked with Watson and McBride on This Is the End, had shot The Righteous Gemstones pilot, and was already on set to fill in for a second-unit DP, and stuntman Christian Brunetti, who also doubled for Schneider in the “But Esau Ran to Meet Him†scene when the character gets hit on the head with a glass blender jar.
“It was like, ‘Sure, I’ll come hang out with my friends and shoot for a few days.’ The day I get there, now I need to cover for Paul. All of a sudden it’s, ‘Here, come shoot the last two weeks of season three,’†Trost says, laughing. “What’s the worst that can happen? Well, day one, here’s the sides for what we’re shooting, and it’s this naked fight.â€
Daley’s extensive planning with Watson and DeMeyers and the preparation of the crew’s electric department eased the transition, Trost says, but the team was still up against time. With only a half-day allotted for Steadicam operator Peter Vietro-Hannum to capture BJ creeping through Stephen’s house and one day for the fight, plus reduced daylight because of the December date, they had to work efficiently and safely. Pryor-Graves designated an area in the house where Schneider could have some privacy before and after filming. Partitions were put up around the lawn to block onlookers, and the action was kept off the monitors so that only people who absolutely needed to see Schneider’s body during filming did. Trost got to work figuring out certain details, like the “right amount of depth of field†during Stephen’s vigorous masturbation scene so that the penis prosthetic Trost delicately refers to as “the foreground object†was just blurry enough. And on the morning of the fight, DeMeyers walked Baltz, Schneider, Baltz’s longtime stunt-double T. Ryan Mooney, and Brunetti through the choreography for the first time.
“As gnarly as it is, it was pretty straightforward and linear. This wasn’t John Wick or Extraction; it wasn’t superlong takes of 30 beats of choreography,†DeMeyers explains. “We’re gonna do a 20-second take of the acting, and then we’re gonna do two beats of action, and then we’re gonna cut.†Especially because Schneider and Brunetti would be nude, DeMeyers insisted that they go over every move until everyone was comfortable, a process that also included the stunt doubles acting out some of the action that Schneider and Baltz would themselves do so the actors understood the speed and intensity they would need to use. Once the cameras started rolling, Mooney and Brunetti handled some of the scene’s biggest moments, including falls, drags, and when Stephen jumps from the bed onto BJ’s shoulders, while the padded-up Schneider and Baltz did the rest. “We were both just in this, like, fugue state, getting through it. Jonathan Watson had said, ‘You’re like a T-1000, you’re just dead behind the eyes, punching through this guy, beating the crap out of him,’†Baltz remembers of the on-set direction they received.
With certain elements of the house destroyed during the fight, Watson and Trost shot chronologically, a process that stretched into the early evening. Baltz and Schneider’s adrenaline was so amped up, they say, that they sometimes overdelivered. Baltz remembers real blood flowing from his fists as he pummeled the sandbag standing in for Schneider’s body; Schneider accidentally connected with Baltz on a full power kick; and during the final 90 minutes of filming, water sprayed from the hose lodged into Baltz’s ears and he lost his hearing.
“I could not hear anything and I was just literally being guided by all these people who I love and trust,†Baltz says. “I think I’m as proud of that day of work as I am of anything I’ve ever done.†Schneider, who calls his trepidation about filming nude “a prison in my mind,†shares the same combination of gratification and relief. “We both had this feeling of, ‘Ah, we did it. We walked through the fire,’†he says. “I’m just proud that I was able to swim to the rock and not drown.â€
In the episode, the nearly five-minute sequence ends with a ravaged, despairing BJ walking away in slow motion and leaving Stephen unconscious on the grass, a significant moment that McBride says Baltz nailed in one take as production wrapped. (“I remember boosting the ISO of the camera to get the shot because the sun had already basically gone down. We definitely pushed it to a red line in terms of how much time we shot that day,†Trost adds.) The haunted air that follows BJ, and his corruption by the Gemstones he loves, will remain a narrative concern throughout the rest of this season, Carcieri says. The physical nudity was there for laughs, but the psychological rawness was meant to linger.
“A lot of times when there’s violence in The Righteous Gemstones, even if it’s Jesse running over the devils in his car in the pilot, you’re like, ‘Yeah, fuck those guys,’†Carcieri says. “This is a different kind of scene. Even though it’s a victory on paper for BJ, it’s not a victory emotionally for him. It’s a loss. We didn’t want you to feel like, ‘Fuck, yeah, get him!’ We wanted you to feel afterward, ‘Oh, that was dark. Is BJ okay?’â€
All interviews were conducted prior to the SAG strike.
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