What happens when two vice principals, who badly want to get promoted, plan to take down their current principal, and end up doing things like rogue teenagers? That’s the premise of the comedy drama Vice Principals. Created by Danny McBride, who also plays the lead, Neal Gamby, the series also stars Walton Goggins and Kimberly Hebert Gregory. Danny and Goggins tell us what really is wrong with the two self-destructive vice principals!
Q Danny, you worked briefly as a substitute teacher when you got out of college — is that what inspired you to come up with this story?
Danny McBride: Yes. Then in 2006, I woke up one day and had this idea that there’s a story about two vice principals fighting for the principal job. I called up (Vice Principals co-creator) Jody Hill and said, ‘I don’t know what this is, but it feels like a rich world that we could do something with.’ So Jody and I locked ourselves up for a week and wrote a screenplay.
Q You originally saw this as a movie. Why did you turn it into a limited series for TV?
DM: I love movies, but TV has turned into a landscape that, I think is more interesting than films right now. With comedies, when you only have an hour and a half, the stories can start to be very similar. So when we dusted off the script in 2014, we thought, ‘What if we tried to craft it into something longer and had the time to really open the story up, figure out the school and play with these dynamics?’
Q What happens when the two rivals, Gamby and Russell, join forces to get rid of new principal Belinda Brown?
Walton Goggins: They just set each other off — and its so much fun, man! I don’t think either one of these guys was capable of doing something like what happens in Episode 2 on their own — but its like they found themselves in a mixed drink that happened to explode.
DM: A central idea is that these guys deal with discipline and bad kids, but they both turn into stupid teenagers here. The irony is that these are the guys in charge of making sure people don’t act like that. And where it goes by the end of this thing is such a strange, dark, dramatic and weird story.
Q Gamby and Russell occasionally make racially-charged and sexist
comments, some of which are directed at Principal Brown, who is African American and a woman. What were you trying to highlight here?
DM: Both of these guys represented this idea of the angry, marginalised white man. But it really has nothing to do with race or gender — it has to do with the idea that Gamby and Russell thought they deserved that job, and they’re willing to compromise on what’s right to get what they think they deserve.
In the first episode, Gamby makes a comment about affirmative action —that Belinda Brown got her degree from Berkeley and he’s ‘affirmative’ about how she did it. I don’t think Gamby’s a racist but I think he’s heard, on whatever news station he listens to, that someone said affirmative action has maybe blocked him from getting something somewhere. And he’s misappropriating this for a woman that has obviously earned her way through this and is the right person for the job.
(Vice Principals premieres in India only on Star World Premiere HD in September)
