A Closing Prayer With the Gemstone Siblings

Spoilers follow for The Righteous Gemstones through series finale “That Man of God May Be Complete,” which premiered on HBO on May 4, 2025. 

Over all four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones, the heirs of the titular Evangelical family have often been their own worst enemies: sabotaging their romantic relationships, competitively one-upping each other in church matters, and pissing off their beloved “Daddy” with all their bullshit. Not so in series finale “That Man of God May Be Complete,” co-written and directed by series creator and star Danny McBride. In the episode’s final act, Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson, who also wrote for the show), and Kelvin (Adam DeVine) are hunted, shot, and left for dead by their actual worst enemy, childhood friend Corey Milsap (Seann William Scott), who blames them for the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.

In the realm of Gemstones absurdity, this ending ranks high — while on his rampage, Corey wears a replica of Michael Jackson’s iconic red-and-gold military jacket; the injured Gemstone siblings smear blood all over their gargantuan lake house as they crawl toward each other to plan how to respond to Corey; the monkey Dr. Watson retrieves Jesse’s gun so he can fire back. But as the siblings pray for a bleeding-out Corey to reach Heaven, the series is also at its most sincere. Jesse’s honest admission that “sometimes we let jealousies corrupt us. Sometimes we don’t think about how we act and how it affects others” could apply to every character on the series.

Between that prayer, the wedding of Kelvin and Keefe (Tony Cavalero), Uncle Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) recommitting to his family, and Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) and Corey’s mom Lori (Megan Mullally) rekindling their romance, it’s a sentimental way for Gemstones to wrap. More importantly for McBride, Patterson, and DeVine, who convened on a Zoom together shortly before the series finale aired, the series’ conclusion is open-ended enough that the audience who watched the Gemstones recurrently fight and make up can imagine for themselves where the siblings go next. “There’s people who could see Kelvin and Keefe starting their own ministry, or BJ and Judy starting a fucking monkey sanctuary, or they could imagine the worst things happening to all of us,” McBride says. “That’s the magic about ending something this way, where there is no definitive.” What is definitive, though, is that even if The Righteous Gemstones is over, McBride, Patterson, and DeVine’s ability to make each other laugh and cry continues.

Do each of you have a favorite fourth-season scene of the others? Danny, do you have a favorite scene of Adam’s?
Danny McBride: Of Adam, not really.

Adam DeVine: He would always say that when I was doing my scenes. He’s like, “That didn’t work for me.” [Shrug.]

D.M.: [Laughs.] I love everything Adam does in the show. I was really impressed with his speech for the Top Christ Following Man. I remember watching Adam doing it and feeling proud. I don’t know why I felt proud. He’s not my son, but I remember feeling like he really rose to the occasion.

A.D.: It’s because you thought I was gonna blow it.

D.M.: My expectations were so low. And Edi always makes me laugh, but the stuff I find even more impressive is when Edi can make me cry. When she gave that speech to Dr. Watson, I thought, Oh, God, it’s getting me! She nailed it, and it was such a cool, fitting culmination of where that character was going and what that character was learning.

Edi Patterson: Thanks, dude!

A.D.: Edi always makes me really laugh. I love the dynamic between Judy and BJ and Dr. Watson, seeing how jealous she got. When BJ was kissing Dr. Watson and you’re, like, falling back into the table, like [pantomimes her shocked stagger], I laughed so hard I rewinded it and played it back. And Danny’s stuff this season, I really liked his dynamic with Gideon — just how insecure Danny is, because Danny is an insecure bitch.

The truth’s coming out.
A.D.: I’m not on your show anymore! Now it can all come out. [Laughs.]

E.P.: Everyone involved, especially these two homies, are always coming from a real place with all of it, even when we’re doing the most ridiculous shit. To watch that morph into pure earnestness is so awesome and moving and funny. I’m with Danny — watching Adam do that speech, it was really impacting. With Danny, he makes me go to those weird in-betweens of crying and laughing when Jesse is hurt or frustrated, or posturing because he’s hurt — anything where he’s trying to show off to Vance Simkins, anything with those fucking capes. That stuff is so uncomfortable, it kills me.

D.M.: We got to find something to work on together. It seems like we would get along really well.

Danny, you said of writing for this cast, “I love trying to concoct situations and scenarios for them, to push them into realms that they may be uncomfortable with or haven’t thought that they could pull off.” For Adam and Edi, did Danny give you anything this season that felt that way? And Danny, did you write anything for yourself that you knew would be challenging?
D.M.: When I use the word “uncomfortable,” I don’t mean something to torture them. But I know what they’re capable of, and it’s hopefully leaning into something that they haven’t tried before. Adam and Edi are so funny and they’re great actors, and any time they’re given an opportunity to show both sides of that, it elevates these characters over just being cartoon characters. These dynamics Jesse had with his own sons, and how to navigate that — that was stuff I hadn’t really messed around with. It was interesting to explore those vulnerabilities that you have as a parent, of falling short of what you hope your kids look at you like.

E.P.: I was always very excited by complicated stuff being thrown into Judy’s life because, like Danny said, it’s more fun to play. There was no line for “She can’t be that wild.” The way we approached her was very freeing and, in my opinion, incredibly feminist because I got to be as fucked up as any guy on TV has ever been. Like, “I cheated on my spouse this season, I gotta make this real enough that people still like Judy.” When we would throw challenging things my way, it was a huge gift.

A.D.: For me, just as a person, I have a hard time being sincere. [Leans into camera.] I’m also not caring or loving.

E.P.: That’s true.

A.D.: Playing those tender moments with Keefe, as a comedy person, I haven’t done a lot of real, heartfelt, romantic-comedy-type things. And it was fun playing it very real and sincere.

Edi, Judy’s scenes go viral pretty regularly, whether that’s Judy kicking the bathroom-stall door or this season with Megan Mullally, where you’re forcing her to touch your “bare titty meat.” How do you approach Judy from a physical-comedy standpoint?
E.P.: Both of those things we found on the day. Kicking the bathroom door was Danny’s idea, he was directing that episode, and I was like, “Of course! That’s the vibe of this whole deal.” And on the day with Megan — Danny, I wanted to ask you. Was the plan all along to do that handheld on the Steadicam?

D.M.: We shot a master of that scene and and I instantly was like, “Fuck, let’s go talk.” [Laughs.] I felt your energy in it, and I felt like this isn’t something that should be static. We should be following you. It needed to feel alive. That’s when we pulled all the dolly tracks up and decided we’re just doing all this shit on handheld, and let you dictate where the camera goes.

E.P.: That was a cool conjunction of ideas. Judy’s hair, the slightly awkward length of her curls, helped me to immediately feel her in my body. All that physical stuff I did to her, we did not have in the script. Humping her, making her hump me, making her touch my side boob, talking about “bare titty meat,” all of that happened on the day. It’s like the chicken or the egg — the permission opens up, and then the truth starts to come through physically.

A.D.: For me, it was my wardrobe. I saw some preachers with big glasses that they definitely don’t need, just glasses for fashion’s sake. I asked Danny if he thought that’d be cool. And when I put those glasses on, I was playing with them, and we added that I’m doing it “for fashions.” It opened up something in me, and I realized [fusses with imaginary jewelry], “Oh, he has little things. He plays with his rings, he plays with his bracelets,” and it freed Kelvin up to let his little freak flag fly a little bit.

D.M.: When we started shooting the pilot, one of the ideas for Jesse was he imagines himself like Elvis or something like that. I would make it like Jesse was always bowed up, like he’s ready to get into something. When I look at something like The Goonies, everybody is so well defined. They’re all their own entity and have their own energy. I really wanted that with us three — that any time you put all three of us in a frame together, the characters are well lived-in, and the way we hold ourselves defines them. And that we look like three totally different types of moron. [Laughs.]

In the finale’s climactic lake-house sequence, Seann William Scott’s Corey stalks the Gemstones and shoots all three before they band together, shoot him, and then pray over him as he dies. What was everyone’s reaction to that?
D.M.: We were pretty deep into shooting when I finally gave that to you guys, right?

E.P.: I had an inkling of some of it, but yes. I knew from helping write the show that there was a possibility where we’re in some kind of shoot-out.

A.D.: Reading it, I was like, “We’re dying? This is the last season, and he’s going to kill us off! This is insane!” It shook me.

Danny, you’re a horror fan and a horror writer. Did you want this sequence to have a genre quality?
D.M.: I definitely wanted it to feel real and grounded. Maybe it’s nature that as people, we’re all sickos, and when you hear that a show’s ending, your initial reaction is, “Who’s going to die?” [Laughs.] It was playing with that. I was like, That’s what people will wonder. Let’s give it to them. Let’s see what that would be like. The physical production of that scene was fucking wild. The lake house was a location we just didn’t have. Nothing felt big enough to film the shoot-out in, to crawl through, to be a Gemstone vacation house. We kept kicking that location down the road. We were thinking, “Are we going to digitally put a lake into the back of a house?” Then our location supervisor, Kale Murphy, found this house in Lake Murray. It’s an 18,000-square-foot house.

I was in that house blocking that ending: Kelvin comes from this hall, Judy from this hall, Corey walks in the front door, he’s shot and falls back into this room, and we surround him and pray. And I’m noticing this fireplace we’re in front of is so beautiful. It’s handcrafted stonework. I asked the owners of the house, “This is going to work great. And what’s the story with that fireplace?” They had it imported from a church from England where it was built in the 1500s, and it happened to be where we shot the final scene with all of us praying. That was a location that we didn’t even have two weeks before we shot it, and the chance that we found that, that those guys thought it was a cool idea to put in an altar from an old English church, it was fucking absolutely nuts. This show has always had that little level of luck, where things that sometimes are detriments would turn into little sparks of magic that would help us land it in a way that was more unexpected than we could have imagined.

A.D.: It was such a crazy scramble at the end trying to get that lake house, and then we showed up, and I’m like, “Was this in your back pocket all along?”

D.M.: The day we shot that last scene where we all do that prayer, the night before was when Hurricane Helene came through North Carolina and South Carolina. All the power was out. Edi, I think a tree fell down and you couldn’t get out of your driveway?

E.P.: I was completely blocked in. A nice man across the street literally pulled up part of his fence so I could drive around.

D.M.: We were screwed. It was our last day there, so already it was going to be pedal to the metal, and I got to the set that morning and it’s still 100 mph winds. There’s no power at the house. No one can come to work. But we didn’t have an alternative. We were wrapping literally the next week and we weren’t coming back to this location. We waited until about 1 p.m. Instead of having a full day to shoot it, we had about four hours to shoot it. And I remember that being such an awesome way to go out with you two, because we all knew how important it was, but we didn’t have the luxury or comfort we had assumed we were going to have. It suddenly just became, Let’s get it. We simplified how it was covered, and the camera just went from one to the rest. Each of you delivered. We got the scene and we got out of there, and I’m so proud of what we got, and it’s wild to know what we had to do to get it.

A.D.: Didn’t the power come back on right as we were about to start? We were scrambling. Everyone’s sweating inside and working in the dark. It was like, “How are we going to get this?” And then all of a sudden [raises his arms, sings angelic note]. It’s almost like the production was … blessed.

D.M.: Hashtag!

For each of you, is there an aspect of your character that you’ll miss performing?
A.D.: I didn’t know Kelvin had this secret that he was a gay man, and then as the show grew, it became more apparent there was a connection with Keefe. Knowing that, as the actor, and playing that secret, I don’t know if I’ll have that opportunity again. It was such a gift.

E.P.: I love Judy. There was just something so fun in being a filterless person who’s on full blast, and then after the full blast go, “Did I break some stuff with that full blast?” [Laughs.] She’s fearless, and I think that’s awesome, and I want to take that into everything.

D.M.: To write something like this in my home in South Carolina, and then the whole circus shows up in town, and all these people put their lives on pause to come here and help tell this story and bring it to life — it’s been such an awesome thing to look forward to every year. We made this show through COVID, through strikes; a lot of the world changed while we made the show. And the change seemed less scary knowing you were going to see your buddies pretty soon and go make something together. I’ll miss so many things about it. Honestly, just being in scenes with these two — I go back to thinking about the first season, when we’re all sitting on Kelvin’s couch telling him it’s okay not to be Jesus, and that Judy’ll have boyfriends who will fucking go down on your butthole, and us just crying laughing and making something so ridiculous. I think about those moments a lot, about how special it was and how funny it was. That’s what I’ll miss.

E.P.: Big-time same.

A.D.: You’re going to make us cry, dude.

E.P.: Same!

A.D.: Filming the last episode, we all gave impromptu speeches about how much we care for one another. And now watching the season, you remember being on set and all the in-between moments, when you’re just hanging out before shooting something.

E.P.: [Turns off camera.] Don’t look at me!

D.M.: Haha, Edi’s crying! [Laughs affectionately, Edi puts her camera back on.]

A.D.: I fell in love with these guys, the whole crew, the cast, and Danny and the Rough House team. They built something really special down there. I was just hanging out with Tim Baltz, and he was saying how much he’s just going to miss it because now would be the time we’re starting to head back, to wear wool sweaters in the middle of Charleston.

E.P.: To put on a whole wool suit!

A.D.: And a wool ascot, for whatever reason.

Thank you, guys. It’s been a pleasure to write about the show.
D.M.: And this was about Gemstones, this interview was?

A.D.: The Righteous Gemstones?

E.P.: Oh!

A.D.: You might have to do a do-over, then.

E.P.: Yeah, I said some wrong stuff.

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