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Judy Gemstone wants to be good so bad. But it’s a struggle.
One time she got angry at her husband’s co-worker and rammed a bunch of shopping carts into their Nissan Cube in the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly, then attacked the security guards who tried to stop her. Another time she thought her married economics professor was flirting with her, so she followed him into his office after class and sexually assaulted him. (“He was fightin’ me, but I thought it was part of his sexy little game.”) After that, he “did a restraining order” on her, so she kidnapped his third-grade son. (“Me and Dr. Carmichael weren’t boyfriends and girlfriends after that, she explained to her husband.) As the only daughter in a family of large adult children who are heirs to a megachurch empire, Judy, who is in the throes of middle age, never really grew up.
“She is a wild animal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Judy and writes for “The Righteous Gemstones,” whose third season premieres Sunday. “The filter is not always there. Sometimes she can muster it, but a lot of times she is just going in on impulse and id.”
If you are still grieving the end of “Succession,” you’ve probably been told by the comedy freaks in your life that “Gemstones” can fill the void. Both series follow the unserious inheritors of a family business as they battle for their father’s throne. But where “Succession” had that Brits-by-way-of-Manhattan sensibility — icy and cool, all stealth wealth and quiet luxury — “Gemstones” is sweaty, loud and Southern, with a sweetness coursing beneath its vulgarity.
On even the raunchiest comedies, female characters can get stuck playing the straight foil for their male counterparts. But on “Gemstones,” Judy is the wildest of the bunch. She is profane, hypersexual and unpredictable. Beneath her bravado, though, she is a squishy-hearted near-innocent who adores her husband, B.J. (Tim Baltz), misses her mom and just wants to be loved.
But in her play for the pulpit, she’s got the sexist deck stacked against her: Her mother, the late Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), was a beloved Christian-music star who was nonetheless subordinate to her husband, Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), who actually ran the church. Now with Eli getting older, Judy is stuck competing for dominance with her brothers: firstborn Jesse, played by Danny McBride in the traditional McBride mold of pompous, all-American dolts; and youngest brother Kelvin (Adam Devine), a youth minister who dresses like a wannabe Bieber.
Like Shiv Roy on “Succession,” Judy is a lone woman among men, married to an outsider whose extravagant efforts at winning the acceptance of his in-laws often leaves him looking ridiculous. Unlike Shiv, Judy stands out for being both totally guileless and absolutely feral. There is, apparently, nothing she would not say to get the attention she craves.
“But I don’t think she’s evil,” Patterson says. “I think she is really doing her best.”
The woman behind Judy Gemstone is Zooming into our interview from London, where she’s filming a TV spinoff of “Sonic the Hedgehog.” Patterson is extremely un-Judy-like in conversation: measured, thoughtful, grounded. Her hair is straight; without Judy’s wig of dark, boingy ringlets, she’s practically unrecognizable. “The second my hair morphs into that, when we are filming, I feel like her,” Patterson said. “There’s something in it that’s stunted-adult. There’s a tiny bit of Shirley Temple.”
For Judy’s look, the wardrobe department put Patterson in “a lot of churchy-type skirt-suits,” Patterson said, which fed her sense that Judy felt, and behaved, like a caged animal. “Something about the almost corporateness of how she has to dress at church really helped me. … It’s almost like I could feel a little bit pissed off at what I’m wearing. Why can’t I just breathe?”
All of Judy’s ideas for how a woman of her station ought to dress, whether in a business or performance setting — where the aesthetic skews very 1980s figure skater — feel a little off and out of date, a child’s idea of what a grown-up would wear. “It’s like Pretty Pretty Princess — more, more, more. The shoes match the bag match the purse,” said Season 3 costume designer Christina Flannery. “It’s all over-the-top, cringe fashion in a weird, cheesy way.” She added, with affection, “What they think is cool isn’t really cool, is it?”
The fact that the Gemstones don’t find anything funny about themselves is key to the show’s sense of humor — particularly Judy, who lives her insane truth with a straight face. “If it’s with a wink, I’m dead,” Patterson said. “That’s the stuff that gut-punches me, is if everyone just means what they say.”
Growing up in Texas City, Patterson was a regular churchgoer (“a small Episcopalian church, not a megachurch at all”) who “was really shy, really, really shy” with everyone except her family. Her dad was a plumber, her mom was a teacher, and her house had no cable. She did impressions at home — her first-grade teacher was British, providing lots of material — and summoned the guts to do a dating-game parody for Class Day in seventh grade. “It was during that that I realized: Oh, whoa. Because the kids were dying, and it was like my body went numb,” Patterson remembered. “That’s when I went, ‘Okay, this is what I need to do forever.’”
She made her way to Austin and got into competitive improv (teams play other teams, like a battle of the bands), then to Los Angeles, where she joined the Groundlings, improvising and writing sketches, and Impro Theatre, performing full-length improvised plays. Her career took off in fits and starts: a pilot that never got picked up, a lot of “weird” jobs. But she was getting enough work to feel like she was “on the right path,” she said. Then she landed a role on “Vice Principals,” McBride’s follow-up to “Eastbound & Down,” playing a teacher with some Judy Gemstone energy — sexually forward, a little aggressive, says out-of-pocket things to get what she wants — who has the hots for McBride’s character.
In his early drafts of the “Gemstones” pilot, McBride was a small-time pastor, and Patterson played his wife. But he could tell that role wasn’t giving Patterson enough to do. “It just felt like it was putting Edi on the sidelines a little bit,” he said. When he landed on these “unscrupulous” siblings running a megachurch, “It just allowed it to be more crazy, more insane, and a funnier relationship.”
Patterson, he went on, “is one of those people that I can watch the most crazy stuff come out of her mouth,” but when one of her characters “is hurting, I feel empathy, and I want her to be fixed, and I want her to feel okay.”
The surprising sincerity laced through the Gemstones’ increasingly bonkers misadventures, which at this point involve a shocking number of homicides, is what gives the show its warmth. While TV obsessives like to compare “Gemstones” to “Succession,” given the obvious patriarch-picks-an-heir parallels, this is possibly the most meaningful difference between the two: The Roys worship nothing but wealth and know, on some level, that the kingdom over which they’re fighting is hollow; their best attempts at familial affection are the stuff of fraternity hazing rituals. But despite the torrent of insults and not-infrequent blasts of gory violence that punctuate “Gemstones,” these idiots actually do believe: in God, in their marriages and in one another.
That the Gemstone kids, deep down, are fiercely devoted to one another is something that comes up a lot in the writers room, Patterson said. “We talk about that: that we always want to make sure that that’s in the mix, [and] you get to glimpse at least once that, ‘Oh, dang, they would really do anything for each other.’ Because that’s how it’s in real life if you have siblings. Even if you’re at each other’s throats constantly, nobody else better come for them.”
Judy starts Season 3 in a dicey place. Following in her mother’s footsteps as a Christian-music star, Judy went on tour, where she engaged in some bad-girl behavior. She’s returned to the family compound wracked with guilt — and dressed as “this powerful, sexy, incredible vixen,” said Flannery, who took inspiration for Judy’s looks from Cher’s Bob Mackie days, 1980s Madonna, Dolly Parton and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Patterson keeps putting her faith in an acting mantra: “If it can be very specific, and you can find just even a nugget in it of, ‘Oh yeah, I bet humans do that’ or ‘I bet humans say that,’ then I think it’s such a blast.” Nothing is off-limits “if we can nail the truth in it.”
Because as shocking as Judy’s antics seem, Patterson knows that audiences can recognize themselves in her, too.
“Honestly, Judy already was alive somewhere in me, and I just have to turn her volume up,” she said. “I think she’s alive in all of us.”
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Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/06/16/judy-gemstone-actor-edi-patterson/