Ben Best

Ben Best
Born	Benjamin Terrell Best September 11, 1974
Died	September 10, 2021
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actor, writer, producer, musician
Known for	Eastbound & Down, The Foot Fist Way, Your Highness
Education	University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Spouse(s)	Carrie Saunders (m. 2011)
Children	1

Benjamin Terrell Best (September 11, 1974 – September 10, 2021) was an American actor, writer, producer, and musician. A longtime creative collaborator of Danny McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green, Best co-created the HBO comedy series Eastbound & Down, which ran for four seasons between 2009 and 2013, and in which he appeared as the recurring character Clegg, a small-town bartender and a childhood friend of central character Kenny Powers. Best co-wrote and co-starred with McBride and Hill in the cult independent comedy The Foot Fist Way (2006), and later co-wrote the 2011 medieval fantasy comedy Your Highness, directed by Green and starring McBride, James Franco, and Natalie Portman. His acting credits also included supporting roles in Superbad (2007), What Happens in Vegas (2008), Observe and Report (2009), and Land of the Lost (2009). Best died on September 10, 2021, one day before his 47th birthday.

Early life

Benjamin Terrell Best was born on September 11, 1974. He pursued his interest in filmmaking and performance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he formed close friendships with a group of classmates who would shape much of his subsequent professional career. Among his fellow students were Danny McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green, each of whom would become a frequent collaborator on Best's later film and television projects.

The North Carolina School of the Arts cohort of the late 1990s produced a wave of filmmakers and performers who went on to define a distinctive strand of American comedy rooted in Southern settings, working-class characters, and absurdist tonal shifts. Best was a core member of that creative circle from its earliest days, and his sensibilities — blending broad comedy with melancholy and regional detail — became a recognizable element of the group's collective output.

Career

The Foot Fist Way

Best's first major credit emerged from the Wilmington, North Carolina, filmmaking community he had joined with his college friends. He co-wrote and co-starred in The Foot Fist Way, a low-budget independent comedy directed by Jody Hill and starring Danny McBride as Fred Simmons, a self-aggrandizing strip-mall taekwondo instructor. Best appeared in the film as Mike McAlister, a martial-arts movie star whom Simmons idolizes. The film, made for a reported budget of approximately $70,000, was completed in 2006 and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 before securing a wider theatrical release in 2008 after being championed by performers including Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.

The Foot Fist Way established the comedic template — a delusional, abrasive male protagonist undone by his own grandiosity — that Best, McBride, and Hill would expand into their subsequent television work. The film's cult success also marked the trio's emergence as a writing-and-producing unit within the Hollywood comedy landscape.

Eastbound & Down

In 2009, Best, McBride, and Hill developed the HBO comedy series Eastbound & Down. The show centered on Kenny Powers, a washed-up former Major League Baseball relief pitcher, played by McBride, who returns to his North Carolina hometown to teach physical education at his old middle school. Best received a "created by" credit alongside McBride and Hill on the series, which premiered on HBO in February 2009 and ran for four seasons, concluding in 2013.

In addition to his role as a co-creator, Best appeared on screen in Eastbound & Down as the recurring character Clegg, a local bartender and one of Kenny Powers's longtime friends from his hometown. Best played the role across eight episodes during the series' run. Eastbound & Down received critical attention for its blend of profane character comedy, regional specificity, and pathos, and it established the McBride–Hill–Best creative collective as a continuing presence at HBO. The series later served as a stylistic predecessor to subsequent McBride-led HBO projects, including Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones.

Your Highness and other writing

In 2011, Best co-wrote, with McBride, the feature film Your Highness, a period fantasy comedy directed by David Gordon Green. The film starred McBride as Prince Thadeous alongside James Franco, Natalie Portman, and Zooey Deschanel, and was released theatrically by Universal Pictures. Your Highness represented Best's most prominent screenwriting credit and was his final collaboration with McBride and Green.

Acting roles

Alongside his work as a writer and co-creator, Best maintained a parallel career as a character actor, often in films connected to his collaborators or to the broader Apatow-adjacent comedy scene of the late 2000s. He appeared in Superbad (2007), the high-school comedy directed by Greg Mottola and produced by Judd Apatow, in which he had a small on-screen role. Best also appeared in What Happens in Vegas (2008), the romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher; in Observe and Report (2009), Jody Hill's mall-cop dark comedy starring Seth Rogen; and in Land of the Lost (2009), the Will Ferrell-led feature adaptation of the 1970s television series.

Best's screen appearances tended to be smaller character parts rather than leading roles, but they kept him within the orbit of the filmmakers and performers with whom he had collaborated from his earliest days as a writer.

Personal life

Best married Carrie Saunders in 2011. The couple's daughter, Harper Courtney Best, was born in 2014.

Best died on September 10, 2021, one day before what would have been his 47th birthday. News of his death was announced the following day. Tributes from collaborators including Danny McBride and Jody Hill followed in trade-press obituaries, with McBride remembering Best as a foundational creative partner from their University of North Carolina School of the Arts days.

Legacy

Although Best's on-screen filmography was modest in size, his role as a co-creator of Eastbound & Down placed him at the center of one of the most influential American television comedies of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The series helped establish a distinct comedic mode — built around delusional, profane Southern antiheroes — that continued to define the work of his collaborators throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, most prominently in McBride's subsequent HBO series Vice Principals (2016–2017) and The Righteous Gemstones (2019–present), both co-created with Jody Hill.

The cult success of The Foot Fist Way is also frequently cited as a foundational text for that comedic sensibility, and Best's contributions as a co-writer and co-star are credited as central to its emergence. Trade-press obituaries published at the time of his death described him as a key creative voice within the North Carolina School of the Arts cohort that included McBride, Hill, and Green — a group whose collective output has had a continuing influence on American film and television comedy.

Best is also recorded in international library and authority databases, including the Library of Congress Name Authority File, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Virtual International Authority File, reflecting his recognition as a credited screenwriter and performer on internationally distributed works.

External links

• Superbad movie clips on snip.ninja