Jack Black Interview

Jack Black is so devoid of vanity about his cherubic body that half an hour into his interview with HQ, he stands up and strips to his underpants in reply to a question about how comfortable he is being filmed in her underwear.

“ I am not actually totally comfortable with my body, but my acting is so good, that you feel I am,” he laughs, as he peels.

The hyper kinetic actor who turns 40 in August is every bit as energetic and playful in person as his many screen personae, but that doesn’t mean that his answers are not serious or considered or that he’s not trying to be helpful.
Being the father of two very young boys is something he is loving, while still working at full tilt. Currently starring in “Year One” with Michael Cera, he has just branched out to producing, as is working on bring a new interpretation of “Gulliver’s Travels” to the screen.

“ Jonathan Swift was Irish, right? When my band Tenacious D and I performed at Marley Park last summer, supporting Metallica, I tried to get to see where Swift had lived when he wrote that mad book,” he tells me. “I failed, sorry.”

Jack Black is the only son of two rocket scientists from Los Angeles. (That’s no joke) His mother Judith worked on the Hubble Telescope. There never seemed to be much chance that their son would follow them into a scientific career and given his near manic energy, school did not go well for him. As a teenager he was eventually sent to a school for troubled teens.

This had a very sobering effect on him and he transferred to the arts oriented Crossroads school, where he began to focus on music in earnest. It was here too that he would also meet his future wife, Tania.

“ She was a couple of years younger than me but she’s an amazing musician and her whole family was always fascinating to me. She’s a triplet and they would sing together incredible harmonies. I was too nervous really to talk to her then but I would see her every couple of years and say “oh, hi, remember me from high school?” and five years ago we started dating. Then we had babies.”

He confesses that he’s pretty childish at home - “there’s not too much difference between me at home and at work, but I do change diapers, so that’s not too infantile of me, is it?”

Skipping between music and acting for many years, Black’s big breakout role really came in 2003 in the delightful “School of Rock” which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a comedy. Since then, he has worked almost constantly, acting in big budget movies opposite the likes of Ben Stiller, Gwynneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, usually, though not always playing comic roles. But he possesses both a unique understanding and love of comedy.

“ Unpredictability I think is key to humour, to comedy especially. The people that I admire have that quality and I strive to achieve it. I think laughter comes from being surprised, like you didn’t see that coming and it makes you laugh. The best comedy, I think is when the comedian is surprising themselves and that’s a trick. That’s not an easy thing to get to and to surprise yourself you have to be really relaxed and just let things flow from the ubconscious, then something will come out of your mouth that you didn’t even expect and that’s a good thing to strive for.”

As a Jew with family links to Holocaust survivors, are any subjects taboo for him?

“ Are there jokes that I wouldn’t say or do? Of course, yeah. I would tell you, but I don’t want to say them because they’re too taboo!” he chortles. “Search your imagination. There are jokes that are just so bad taste that no-one would laugh”.

Black receives tons of fan mail every week, much of it from England and a lesser amount from Ireland, but he is not good about responding to fans.

“ I’ve got a stack and I got to go through the stack, but I just don’t trust the stack. Usually when I get a piece of mail from someone I don’t know, I feel like it’s just someone that wants to get a photo so they can sell it. How do you differentiate?”

Given his absence of leading man looks, Black is pretty sanguine about turning 40, although he won’t be able to celebrate this milestone birthday as he would like.

“ I am angry because my band invited to open for Pearl Jam in San Francisco. Golden State Park for 50,000 people on my birthday and I thought “that is a good way to turn 40, in front of a huge rock and roll audience”. But the movie that I’m making right now, wouldn’t let me. They said “no, we might still be filming” and I said “come on, please, I’m a star. Let me off for one day.” They said “no, no, we paid you, now you have to work on your birthday.””

It’s clear that for all his joking around, Black is a serious and respected pro about whom a bad word is never said professionally. Beginning to work as a producer on “Gulliver’s Travels” is something he is relishing.

“ I have really enjoyed the development process with Gullier. Getting with writers and working out the details of the script and the rewrites and finding a director for the piece, going with him through the process of hiring the crew. It turns out I like all the aspects of production. Hopefully, it’ll be a big hit and then I’ll be producing more movies.”