Jack Black. The name sounds mischievous, a code name for fun
and wild times. The impish grin and almost maniacal eyes
only enhance that impression, but would you believe that
this comic madman’s parents were rocket scientists?
He was born in Hermosa Beach, California on August 28, 1969.
His father, Thomas, was a satellite engineer, and his
mother, Judith, worked on the Hubble space telescope. He
remembers his parents fighting constantly, and eventually
divorcing when he was 10. The breakup was traumatic for the
boy who went to live with his father, and remembers being
hungry for attention, one motive for his desire to act. “I
knew that if my friends saw me on TV, it would be the answer
to all my prayers,” he told Newsweek. As luck would
have it, Black managed to get a role in an Atari TV
commercial when he was only 13. “I was awesome,” he said,
“for three days. Then it wore off. But it gave me the
hunger.”
After attending the Poseidon School, a private facility
geared to students who were struggling in a traditional
educational environment, he went to the Crossroads School
where he demonstrated his talents in the drama department.
Impatient with academics and eager to get started on a
career in showbiz, he dropped out of UCLA and never looked
back.
He got into the movies thanks to Tim Robbins.
“I was a groupie of Tim’s acting troupe in L.A.,” he said.
“I didn’t sleep with any of them, but I hung out until one
day I got a small part in one of their plays. Then when Tim
made his first big film, he gave me a break.” That break was
a small role in Robbins’ 1992 political satire, Bob
Roberts.
The door was opened, and Black slipped in to take on a slew
of TV roles. In addition to appearances on such popular
series as The X-Files, Northern Exposure, and
Picket Fences, he got a pilot of his own, Heat
Vision and Jack, directed by Ben Stiller with Ron Silver
as co-star. It didn’t sell, but Black found his way back
into movies with small roles in Mars Attacks, The
Fan, The Cable Guy, Waterworld,
Demolition Man, and two more Tim Robbins’ directed
films, Dead Man Walking and Cradle Will Rock.
It was his role as Barry, an opinionated blowhard and wild
man employed in John Cusack’s record store in 2000's High
Fidelity, that really brought him to the public’s
attention and earned him best supporting actor nominations
from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Online Film
Critics, and the MTV Movie Awards.
The role was perfect for Black who experienced an epiphany
of sorts when visiting a record store in his youth.
“I was listening to Journey and Styx,” he reminisced in an
interview with Jeffrey Anderson. “One day I went to the
record store and the guy told me not to buy the new Journey
album. Instead he handed me a copy of Blizzard of Oz
by Ozzy Osbourne.”
It was then that Black became a confirmed rock ‘n’ roller.
In 1994, he formed Tenacious D with fellow vocalist and
guitarist Kyle Gass, but it wasn’t until 1999 that the
comedy rock duo began to attract a following when they
launched a TV series on HBO and performed gigs as an opening
act for various rock bands.
“We are sincere, kind of,” he said of Tenacious D. “But, you
know, I actually tried to rock sincerely in high school in a
band and was a miserable failure.. It wasn’t until Kyle and
me figured out the key was to not take it seriously,” he
told IGN, “while embracing the rock, also kind of making fun
of it.”
The band’s first album, released on Epic in 2001, reached
number 33 on Billboard and went platinum. Tenacious D
has continued through Black’s big-screen success and has
benefitted from his increasingly high profile in movies.
Shallow Hal,
the 2001 comedy by the Farrelly Brothers, represented his
next step up on Hollywood’s ladder. Co-starring with Gwyneth
Paltrow, Black joked that “I was a little afraid that she
would fall head-over-heels in love with me, like she did
with Brad Pitt in Se7en.”
The movie, though a hit, wasn’t exactly a contender for
awards. Here you had Paltrow in a 25-pound fat suit being
wooed by Black, an insensitive boor with an interest only in
a woman’s physical attributes, transformed into a
kind-hearted soul capable of appreciating inner beauty
through the intervention of life coach Tony Robbins
(appearing as himself).
The normally tasteless Farrellys wanted to ensure that the
comedy had a message, and by most accounts they succeeded. “Shallow
Hal is often very funny,” Roger Ebert wrote in The
Chicago Sun-Times, “but it is also surprisingly moving
at times.” Black himself sounded almost apologetic, however,
saying “I wasn’t proud of it, and I got paid a lot of money
($2 million, in fact), so in retrospect it feels like a
sellout.” It also won him a Teen Choice Award nomination as
best actor in a comedy.
He provided his voice for the animated Ice Age the
next year, but it was 2003's
School of Rock
that kicked his career to another level.
“I’ve never done a movie that someone wrote for me before,”
he said, but writer Mike White had no one else in mind for
the role of Dewey Finn, who masquerades as a substitute
teacher and grooms a class of fifth graders to become rock
‘n’ rollers after he’s kicked out of his band.
“Dewey is basically me five years ago,” Black said, “when I
was desperate, frustrated and had no career. But the
difference is that I make fun of music and he never would.”
He did see “more desperation in Dewey’s situation, although
I had that, too, when I was younger I was really super
desperate to get some rock in my world.”
The movie proved to be a perfect meeting of Black’s biggest
passions: comedy and rock ‘n roll.
“I had a lot of opinions about what the music would be in
the movie,” he told ING. With an alternate career in music
with Tenacious D, Black was careful about what he sang
because a wrong choice “could be a huge disaster on many
fronts.”
Black even managed to win over Led Zeppelin, the ‘70s
rockers notorious for turning down all requests to license
their music.
“They weren’t going to let us use it,” he said of Zeppelin’s
“The Immigrant Song.” The solution, proposed by director
Richard Linklater, was for Black to ask the band for
permission at the end of a concert scene staged with a
thousand extras.
“I used the audience as my back-up,” he said, “I had them to
chant with me, just basically groveling to Zeppelin, the
gods of rock, to let us use their song or else our movie was
going to explode into pieces. And they did it. It worked!
They let us pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Although much of the film might have seemed improvised,
Black insists that School of Rock was “all scripted.
And it may seem like I’m doing a lot of improv, but that’s
just ‘cause Mike wrote it in my voice, so it was really
easy.”
Although it appealed to a wide audience, Black considered
School of Rock
a “kid’s movie,” but without the insipidness that frequently
characterizes such films. “I just wanted to go into it full
guns a’ blazin,’ with my heavy artillery, and not be soft,
you know?” He succeeded. “Hail! Hail! Jack Black,” raved
Peter Travers in Rolling Stone, who called him “the
clown king of rock and roll.”
With success, he told NPR in 2010, “I definitely shed the
insecurities that go with being an anonymous face in the
crowd, one of the little peeps, one of the little small
potatoes in a big man’s world.”
He entered the “big man’s world” for sure when Peter Jackson
cast him as Carl Denham, the obsessed film director, in the
2005 remake of King Kong.
“They had told me they were looking for kind of a young
Orson Welles kind of film maker, who is really cocky, filled
with a sort of youthful exuberance and a little bit of
hubris,” he told MovieWeb. “He’s like the unsuccessful
version of Orson Welles, so he’s got this chip on his
shoulder but also this hunger to be hailed as a genius.”
Although there were comic aspects to the role, Black saw
that playing Denham was “uncharted stuff for me and I
approached it the same way I approach all my roles. I take
them all seriously, funny or not.”
Black counts the filming in New Zealand as one of his
favorite experiences.“ It was a film to remember for me.”
It was also a film to remember for most of those who saw it,
though not always for the same reasons. Time’s
Richard Corliss thought it “wretchedly excessive,” and J.
Hoberman in The Village Voice dismissed it as
“acutely self-conscious without being particularly
self-reflective.” But Roger Ebert called it “one of the
great modern epics,” and Lisa Schwarzbaum in
Entertainment Weekly praised it as “a spectacle, a love
story, an essay on the very nature of creation.”
Stuffed with amazing special-effects, the three-hour and
seven minute extravaganza was a triumph for the director
more than the cast, but it provided Black with an
opportunity to display his comic gifts while also showing
off the dramatic skill that audiences might not have
expected from the star of Shallow Hal and School
of Rock.
It was back to comedy with 2006’s Nacho Libre in
which Black played a monk who wants to make it as a Mexican
wrestler. “The whole endeavor rests on the flabby shoulders
of Black who spends almost the entire film jiggling his
shirtless frame across the widest of screens,” opined The
Village Voice, while Rolling Stone, though
finding Black’s effort to milk laughs from the premise “a
losing battle,” nonetheless observed that “you have to
admire an actor who is willing to use everything from
indecent exposure to an outrageous Mexican accent to get a
laugh.”
As a man who describes himself as “hungry for rock, 24/7,”
he was an appropriate choice to speak about Pete Townsend
and Roger Daltrey, the surviving members of The Who, when
the British band known for its rebellious anthems (“My
Generation,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again”) were honored for
their life achievement at the Kennedy Center in 2008. “Thank
you,” he said, “for blowing our minds and touching our
hearts.”
That year, he also appeared in two very successful films,
Kung Fu Panda and Tropic Thunder. The former, a
computer animated comedy from the DreamWorks studio,
featured Black as a panda with dreams of becoming a kung fu
master. Audiences loved the film, and so did most of the
critics, with The New York Times describing it as
“high concept with a heart.” In the latter film, a satire of
Hollywood excess with Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey,
Jr, as actors shooting a war film that turns surprisingly
real, Black was Jeff “Fats” Portnoy, a role said to have
been based on the late Chris Farley. To Stephanie Zacharek
in Salon, the Stiller-directed comedy was “an
imperfect work of genius,” but “almost appalling in its
tastelessness.” Asked if he was ready to do a straight
action movie after Tropic Thunder, Black said, “I
don’t think anyone would buy it. It has to be funny.”
Gulliver’s Travels,
a comic retelling of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 classic about a
traveler who lands on an island inhabited by no one taller
than six inches, was supposed to be funny. Taking some
liberties with the source material, Black’s Gulliver is a
travel writer who, as he told NPR, “goes to the Bermuda
Triangle to write a piece on it. Unfortunately, he gets
sucked into an inter-dimensional wormhole. Everyone knows
that’s what’s at the center.”
Black’s Gulliver was also rather shy and nervous, qualities
one does not associate with the star, but which he cites as
an example of how the role was tailored for him. “Even
though I seem like a big, bombastic, outgoing dude, when it
comes down to it with the ladies,” he told Rob Carnevale, “I
was always very shy. It was difficult to form sentences with
the girl of my dreams.”
When it came to Gulliver’s other traits, Black relied on the
special-effects department to turn him into the giant of
Swift’s fantasy. “It is weird to be, like, flailing around
or talking to someone else in front of a blue screen when
there’s no one there,” he told NPR. “It’s one of those times
when you look at yourself and you go, I have a very strange
job.” The role did make him more sympathetic to King Kong,
however. “I do have some newfound respect for the King,” he
told Christopher Toh. “Yeah, poor King Kong. It doesn’t work
when you’re 100 feet taller than your loved ones.”
Unfortunately, this new Gulliver’s Travels resembled
those six-inch tall Lilliputians more than a giant when it
opened to poor box-office and disastrous reviews on
Christmas Day 2010. The Wall Street Journal thought
it “monumentally dreadful,” and most critics were
disappointed with the special-effects. Black’s performance
did not emerge unscathed either, with The New York Daily
News calling him “lazy and familiar.” He was honored, in
a sense, for his performance when he was awarded a Razzie as
the year’s worst actor.
As expected, Kung Fu Panda 2 was a success the
following summer, and even surpassed the original film at
the box-office.
Next up is The Big Year, due in theaters in October
2011, with Black joining Steve Martin and Owen Wilson as
competing bird-watchers. In March comes Bernie
directed by
School of Rock’s
Richard Linklater with Black as a mortician. Shirley
MacLaine and Matthew McConaughe are his co-stars. Then he
joins Nicolas Cage and Steve Carell for Charlie Kaufman’s
Frank or Francis, which Variety describes as “a
satire set to music.”
Some critics have suggested that no matter the role, be it
the slackers of his most notable comedies, or the obsessed
director of King Kong, Jack Black is always Jack
Black with the only real difference being the name of the
character. Insisting that he isn’t bothered by that charge,
he says, “Everyone is who they are. You can put on different
masks and accents, but at the core you’re still who you are
and you bring your life experiences to every role.”
And Jack Black is happy to be Jack Black.
“Oh gosh, what’s bad about being me? Not much.”