Danny McBride has a special flair for playing obnoxious loudmouths — the kind of outwardly cocky yet inwardly tragic jerks that he’s brought indelibly to life in films like “The Foot Fist Way,” “Pineapple Express,” “This Is the End” and the HBO series “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals."

So when he was first approached about joining the cast of Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi horror film “Alien: Covenant,” he had a pretty good idea what the gig would entail. Or at least he thought he did.

“When I got the script, I was like, ‘I’m sure they’re just going to make me tell a bunch of jokes and then I’ll get my head ripped off,’” McBride said.

He was sitting in the offices of Rough House Pictures, the production company he co-founded with two longtime film school friends, directors Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, as a home for projects too left-of-center for the mainstream studios.

But as it turned out, McBride was totally wrong.

For the latest installment in the long-running “Alien” franchise, Scott gave McBride the kind of part he seldom gets: a sweet-natured character for whom you only wish the best. As a colonization-ship pilot named Tennessee, McBride shows off his dramatic chops in a performance that is devoid of a single crude joke, bong hit or moment of cringe-inducing, Kenny Powers-style hubris.

“I’d seen Danny on TV and in other things,” Scott said, “and he reminded me somehow of Slim Pickens, who most memorably played a B-29 bomber pilot in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ I thought, ‘Let’s give this a little bit of a nod to Stanley.’ I thought it would give him a different characterization than you normally find in this kind of film.”

McBride, as it happens, is full of surprises. Over the course of an hourlong conversation, the 40-year-old actor, gamely fighting off a cold he had picked up from one of his two young kids, revealed a few things even his many fans might not know about him.

When he was growing up, comedy wasn’t his thing.

“Comedy was probably the genre I watched the least,” said McBride, who was raised in Virginia and went on to attend film school in North Carolina. “I was never someone who was out there trying to cut up for my friends. That kind of stuff would actually annoy me. When we were at the North Carolina School of the Arts, we film-school guys would purposely sit away from the drama people in the cafeteria because those people were always doing bits and performing — and I was like, ‘Ecch.’”

Contrary to what you might think, he is nothing like the egotistical redneck bullies he plays so well.

“I get it all the time: People assume that it’s not a performance, that I’m just this guy,” McBride said. “But I wasn’t a dude, like, running around with a shotgun, hunting. I grew up around lots of those guys, but it wasn’t who I was. I was the kid running around in middle school and high school with a video camera, making movies.”

“Danny is not like Kenny Powers at all,” said Hill, who co-created “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals,” in which McBride plays a fairly loathsome and vindictive school administrator. “He’s one of the smartest guys I know. The rest of the world knows him as a certain type of performer, but I’ve always known Danny as a great talent.”

He doesn’t even swear around his parents.

“I grew up in a religious house where I had perfect attendance at Sunday school,” McBride said. “I went to a Baptist church, and my parents did puppet ministries there.”

When he started appearing in R-rated comedies, he said, “I think for my mom it was a moment of, ‘Whoa, he’s doing this stuff on-screen and I don’t know if I’m ashamed of him or not.’”

He is a lifelong horror buff.

“When I was a kid, all my sister and I would rent were horror movies,” he said. “You’d go to the video store and look at the covers and decide what you wanted to be scared by that night.”

The original 1979 “Alien” was a particular favorite. “I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I can remember being afraid of the idea of something like that chest-bursting scene happening to me at a very young age,” he said. “Every time there was a grumble in your stomach, you’d be like, ‘Is it going to be that?’”

Getting cast in “Alien: Covenant,” then, was a dream come true for McBride, says Green, who has directed the actor in films like “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness.” “When Danny told me about ‘Alien,’ I just started laughing,” Green said. “We’re still just 11-year-old nerds on the inside, geeking out about what we get to do for a living.”

The whole comedy-stardom thing has just been one long, unexpected detour from his first love of writing and directing.

Back in film school, McBride began acting in projects for friends like Hill and Gordon Green only because he happened to be around and had a surprising knack for it. “I never envisioned a career in acting,” he said. “I never really thought about it.”

Now that he has built up some clout in the industry, he’s looking to use it to nurture other filmmakers. “Rough House became an extension of what Jody and David and I did as friends back in film school — finding filmmakers or scripts that we like, sharing them and trying to figure out if we can help get them made,” he said.