Danny McBride’s Don Gato Tequila Hits Charlotte with Hometown Connection

In a video dropped on social media on May 5, actor, comedian and writer Danny McBride (The Righteous Gemstones) hammers away at a manual typewriter in a vast sun-dappled agave field.

“Let’s be honest,” McBride intones in voiceover. “Cinco de Mayo is not about waiting two hours in line at a cheesy restaurant.” 

It’s the latest in a series of surreal videos that comprise the advertising campaign for McBride’s new brand of top-shelf tequila. Named for fictitious masked Mexican wrestler Don Gato, the liquor joins a slew of celebrity tequilas flooding the market, including brands launched by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, George Clooney, Michael Jordan, Matthew and Camila McConaughey and more.

Don Gato has a Charlotte connection in Chris Walldorf, a local musician, composer and film editor who has scored and cut several documentaries including the 2020 Netflix series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer.

Walldorf was part of a crew of students at University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) in Winston-Salem that included McBride and future filmmakers David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) and Jody Hill (Eastbound & Down, The Righteous Gemstones). 

The group of friends hung out together and helped each other with projects, as when Walldorf edited McBride’s senior thesis film. The two lived together in Plaza Midwood while shooting what would become McBride’s breakout film, The Foot Fist Way (2008), in Concord. 

With his brother Chad, an entrepreneur who co-founded the Sticky Fingers Rib House restaurant chain, Chris is one of McBride’s business partners in Don Gato, which landed in the Charlotte market last month. 

“Sure, we like that Don Gato is additive free. And sure, we’re fans of anything Danny McBride,” read an April Instagram post from Neighborhood Theatre celebrating Don Gato’s arrival at its bar. “But frankly, what really made us put Don Gato on our shelf is that it’s co-owned by none other than Chris Walldorf, owner of Sioux Sioux Studio & drummer for many artists who have played our stage including Moa, Sam The Lion, Pyramid, Sea of Cortez, & Ancient Cities. We’re a small community here in the Queen City’s music scene & when one of us succeeds, we all succeed!”

Chris called McBride “the expert” in this particular business venture. “I didn’t know much about tequila coming into this,” he said. 

He was able to lend his own expertise, however, in creating the ad campaign that has already garnered critical acclaim from marketing outlets. 

Walldorf joined McBride, Green, actor Steve Little and the mysterious Don Gato plus a crew of 40 on a trip to Jalisco, Mexico in March 2024 to shoot footage for the campaign over 18 vignettes in the lead-up to the brand’s September 2024 release. 

Acting as editor and composer on the project, Walldorf said the cast and crew were on site for five to six days, shooting for three days in an agave field, a wrestling arena and Don Gato’s mansion.  

Walldorf says that, while the fragmented vignettes do build on each other and fill in an overall story arc, the creative minds behind the ad rollout were aiming for a “What the hell did I just see?” response from the audience of each one on its own. 

“It’s like getting pieces of scenes from a movie that doesn’t exist,” Walldorf says. “You’re being dropped into something.” 

Though wrestler Don Gato never talks in the commercials, the stoic, heroic, luchador is the spokesman and face for the tequila that bears his name — not McBride. 

In the origin story cooked up by the comedian, the immaculately attired luchador, who favors a blue blazer over spandex, retired from the ring when tragedy struck. Now Don Gato hangs out in his palatial Mexican estate where he concentrates on caring for his beloved cats and crafting quality tequila.

The mysterious, super cool Don Gato is frequently funny, particularly in a vignette where he bares his claws and hisses like a cat, setting off a “hissy fit” fight that eventually involves three people, a cat and a human coughing up a hair ball. Most of the humor, however, is directed at McBride and actor Steve Little, who play buffoonish versions of themselves. 

The conceit of the campaign is that McBride and Little have traveled to Mexico to get a “contact cool” from Dan Gato, hoping that the feline-loving lucha libre legend’s mystique will rub off on them. Little worked with McBride on HBO comedy series Eastbound & Down and played a smaller role in The Righteous Gemstones; the pair’s timing and rapport are impeccable.

In the Cinco de Mayo video, spaghetti western music gallops over clips of Don Gato in action while McBride’s voiceover tackles America’s cringe-worthy cultural appropriation of the holiday. 

“It’s definitely not about drinking a sugary concoction out of a plastic sombrero. It’s about living up to the legends who made Mexico what it is today. It’s about celebrating bravery, honor and community.”

Ad Age praised the launch campaign for its “inspired stupidity” and its use of a “ludicrous luchador,” but the genius of the video vignettes is that they display knowledge and appreciation for modern Mexican folklore. Don Gato is constantly masked, his face never seen, much like Mexico’s real-life wrestler and national hero Santo, who was famously buried in his mask when he died in 1984.

Capturing the lucha libre look and sound

The elliptical scenes, shot by The Righteous Gemstones cinematographer Michael Simmonds, boast a look reminiscent of 1960s and ’70s lucha libre movies that featured wrestlers like El Santo and his rival The Blue Demon — a possible inspiration for the blue-masked Don Gato — battling werewolves, vampires, mummies and human adversaries. 

“If you look at [lucha libre movies], they have that slightly grainy, oversaturated 1970s Technicolor look,” Walldorf says.

While some of the vignettes were scored by Joey Stevens, who worked on the soundtrack for The Righteous Gemstones, the bulk of the ad campaign’s music was composed by Walldorf. 

Read more: Local Songwriters Take Musical Roles in ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

Spaghetti westerns were a sonic touchstone for the score, but for some of the funniest vignettes, Walldorf turned to a surprising inspiration: the haunted lullaby cues of classic horror films, like Krzysztof Komeda’s score for Rosemary’s Baby.

“Instead of scoring the comedy, it’s a little dark,” Walldorf says. “It’s a fun juxtaposition.”

Similarly, Walldorf notes that the scene that most amused the Mexican crew was a dark vignette called “Jimador Chop.” Here, McBride and Little are toiling alongside the jimadors, Mexican farmers who harvest the agave plants with an incredibly sharp flat-bladed knife on the end of a pole called a “coa” or “coa de jima.”

“It’s amazing to see those guys chop the agave,” Walldorf says. They are unbelievably skilled.”

In the video, Little confidently wields the coa and promptly thrusts the blade into his foot.

“We’re making fun of that idea where [gringos say], ‘Oh, we’ll get out there and … help the workers do the agave.”

Walldorf feels the entire campaign is also poking fun at the self-seriousness of celebrity tequila ads.     

“[You’ll see] a celebrity sitting around a campfire with the jimadors and drinking,” he notes. “Obviously that’s not real; they’re not really hanging out. They probably rolled into Mexico and spent about four hours shooting and flew out.”

Walldorf believes the ad campaign has drawn appreciation and praise because all creative input was scripted, shot and in the can before any ad agency could get involved. 

“Once it goes through all the chains of command and everybody [in the agency] has weighed in on it, it kind of gets beiged down,” he says. 

The team approached the making of the actual product in a similarly pure way. While all tequila is distilled from agave, a succulent plant native to Mexico and the southwestern United States, the selling point for Don Gato brand tequila is that it is 100% additive free. 

Even some high-end brands cannot make that claim, Walldorf noted.

“They use younger plants that haven’t reached their maturity, and they put artificial sweeteners in [the tequila] to hide the the flavor of their prematurely pulled agave,” Walldorf said. “[Tequila] is so much better without all that [added] stuff. You really taste the difference.”

The agave-based liquor derives its name from its birthplace, the town of Tequila in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. Similar to the way that sparkling wines can only be called champagne if they’re made in the Champagne region of France, true tequila such as Don Gato has to be made in one of a handful of places like Jalisco. 

Don Gato tequila is now in 10 states, Walldorf notes. In Charlotte, it’s available at local ABC stores, Mac’s Speed Shops, State of Confusion, The Matador, Superica, Don Pedro, Fahrenheit, Sheps Bar & Grill, Neighborhood Theatre, Paco’s Tacos & Tequila, Calle Sol, The Pumphouse in Rock Hill and plenty of other locations.

Walldorf says more Don Gato video vignettes are on the way. Meanwhile, the legendary luchador appeared in person in late April at a professional wrestling event at Charleston music venue The Windjammer.

“Don Gato showed up to correct an error that one of the luchadores had made,” Walldorf says. “As a manager, he got out in the ring and kicked some ass.”

As McBride and Little discovered in their south-of-the-border sojourn, no one is cooler than Don Gato.