When people consider Jack Black, they often think of the goofy, self-deprecating Dewey from School of Rock or Professor Sheldon Oberon of Jumanji. Despite this impression, Black actually has more to offer than just being the supporting comic relief. In a Parade interview, Black reveals that it wasn’t being the funny man that attracted him to acting, it was the roles where he “felt like he connected to something emotional and real” that would keep him up at night.
Jack Black's Early Days
Black, even with his effortless rise to stardom, didn’t always have it easy. He encountered the darker side of life early on when his parents, satellite engineers Thomas William Black and Jacob Love Cohen, divorced and Black developed a drug addiction. He was able to steer away from this behavior when he discovered acting and saw that it was the “escape” he needed, he comments to Parade that it was “really a drug unlike anything else."
After high school, Black briefly attended UCLA and then dropped out to perform in Tim Robbins’ acting group called Actors Gang. From there, Black achieved small bit supporting roles in the 1990s in television shows like Northern Exposure and The X-Files. In 2000, he starred in his break-out role in High Fidelity in which he plays the carefree record store employee of John Cusack. He then navigated towards similar comedic roles in School of Rock, Shallow Hal, Tenacious D, and Gulliver's Travels. Black has experimented with more dramatic, less comedic roles with great acting over the years, mostly under the radar, and has accepted more dignified characters as of late. Here is a bit about Jack Black’s transition from funny-man to a talented actor.
Jack Black as the Straight Man
Black’s very first dramatic, severe role was in a 1997 film called The Jackal. In this movie, he plays Ian Lamont, a shady gunsmith who is hired to create a weapon for Bruce Willis’ character. The role is brief since he is promptly killed after trying to sabotage Willis’ character, but it was a start to Black’s reputation as a versatile actor. Jack went on to star in King Kong in 2005, where he plays a money-hungry movie producer, another detour from his usual roles. Sure, when asked if he was trying to go beyond the audience’s expectations with the role in a MovieWeb interview with Black, he admitted that he “just wanted to party with Peter Jackson.” Nonetheless, he surprised many.
Black’s dramatic performance in King Kong made more of an impact on viewers than he realized, because soon after he was cast in Nancy Meyer’s film from 2006 romantic comedy The Holiday. In a discussion with Collider, Black explains that Myer saw a “soft side” to him that she thought he could utilize. He goes on to admit that roles of this nature are always more challenging because they require more “sensitivity” than he is used to. Despite this belief, Black went on to experiment with more dramatic roles, with a wonderful performance in the Noah Baumbach film Margot at the Wedding and some great work in the early 2010s.
His next, more critically-acclaimed serious role was in the 2011 film Bernie, which reuinted him with School of Rock director Richard Linklater. Jack Black plays Bernie Tiede, an assistant mortician who murders a wealthy widow named Majorie Nugent. Tiede uses Nugent’s money to support the local community and is eventually caught in his lies. In Roger Ebert’s review of the film, Ebert said that he “had to forget everything he knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air [and] it’s like nothing he’s ever done before”. Ebert goes on to call it “one of the best performances of the year.”
The film’s story was based on a real event and so to accurately portray Bernie’s personality, Black went and spent time with the real-life Bernie. In a Rotten Tomatoes interview, Black explains that the real-life Bernie is a “very soft and sweet guy” and in Black’s version of the role he wasn’t “thinking about what was going to get him the biggest laughs."
Jack Black, Still Perfecting His Craft
Since Bernie, Jack Black has dabbled in both his comfortable comedic roles and also some more dramatic characters. In 2016, Black accepted the role of R.L. Stine in Goosebumps, a protective father with many secrets. In 2017, he played feminine, soft-spoken polka legend Jan Lewan in the Netflix’s original The Polka King, and in 2018 acted as dark, hard-partying Dexter in Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot.
Van Sant says in an Amazon Studios interview that Black was really able to “come back down to Earth” for the part and avoid his usual, eccentric episodes. While people are still excited about Black's hit roles in Jumanji and future Tenacious D performances, there is a strong interest in his ability to play a variety of roles, something he's proved in these excellent, multidimensional performances. In 2022, Black is set to star in Eli Roth's rendition of Borderlands and, has recently worked with Linklater yet again for Netflix's animated project Apollo 10 ½.