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Black on Black
Jack Black, the star of the new movie Kung Fu Panda, talks about his role as a chubby, furry animal; what it’s like to be a funny person; and how being an actor is like being a chef. By Joseph Guinto. Illustration by Tim Bower.
 Jack Black is yawning. Repeatedly. He’s just finished making a music video that promotes his role as host of Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards, and now he has to promote his role in the new, big-budget animated movie Kung Fu Panda, in which he stars as a kung fu–fighting panda. Obviously. So Black is tired. Also obviously. But he’s behind schedule. It’s about 7:30 on a Sunday evening in Los Angeles, and Black still has a slew of one-on-one interviews to do to publicize the movie. Several of those are with writers on the East Coast -- sleepy writers on the East Coast, like me.
This is a toxic combination. Black is wiped out and turned off. Spent. The writers, meanwhile, want -- no, need -- him to be something else. They need him to be that guy. That guy from the mock rock band Tenacious D and from the movies School of Rock, High Fidelity, and Nacho Libre. That dazed and confused smart aleck whose oversize frame and alternately melodramatic and singsong way of delivering dialogue makes him something of an animated character that’s come to life.
But Black is not going to be that guy tonight. He’s already put out all the comic energy he can muster. So, forget it, writers. Black’s not going to be funny for you now. And the funny thing about that is the reason he’s able to be funny in the first place is due to moments just like this one, moments when he’s not funny at all. “People expect me to be funny all the time,” Black tells me at just after 11 p.m. my time. “The other day, I was playing poker, and the guy down at the other end of the table from me was being really loud and obnoxious. I was just kind of being quiet and playing the game and sometimes thinking about other things. And the guy at the other end says” -- and here Black starts using a vaguely Texas-sounding accent -- “ ‘Man, you sure are serious over there, Jack Black. I expected something more wild and funny from you.’ But I am not always funny. I’m not the life of the party all the time. I have a lot of quiet, shy times.”
And many of those quiet, shy times come when Black is on a movie set, in the moments right before he’s at his wildest and funniest. “A lot of times, I’m sitting quietly and waiting for the inspiration in a scene, and it’ll look like I’m doing nothing,” Black says. “So someone will come up and break my concentration by going, ‘Sure is cold today, huh? Looks like there are some clouds coming.’ And then I just have to get away.”
Having quiet time is most important to Black not in the long, tedious (and, we assume, sleepy) hours he spends waiting around on a film set but in the few minutes before the director yells “Action!” “Your preparation has to be fresh,” he says. “If you do all your work an hour before shooting, it’s going to dissolve. It’s kind of like you’re a chef making a meal: You have to heat up the performance right before the cameras roll. You want to serve it nice and hot. You want that bubbling and that crispness that you get in the broiler. You don’t want to do all your preparation before and then just reheat it in the microwave.
”
But after a day of cooking, the oven is off. Black’s not going to fire up a bubbling mess of comedy. Instead, we’ll have to settle for learning his recipe. What makes Black’s comedies -- likely to soon include Dream-Works’ Kung Fu Panda -- so mouthwatering to movie audiences? As it turns out, there are just four key ingredients.
Ingredient One:
Several cups of attention craving
Black grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, as an upper-middle-class kid, the son of two satellite engineers who worked at TRW. He himself had no interest in science, nor in school, for that matter. But he did want -- need -- to garner laughs and attention. He discovered this at the age of nine, when after dinner at a family friend’s house, everyone played the freeze game, an improvisational comedy game in which the audience can “freeze” the action in any given skit and the characters then have to change positions. Black found himself the star of the game. “That was probably the first time “I wanted to be the fascinating person on the inside of the crowd --there probably was some kind of insecurity driving that -- so I tried to figure out ways to get people to laugh.”
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I was exposed to that kind of fun,” Black says. “I wanted it to go on and on. I definitely knew I had to play that some more at some point. I didn’t know that was going to be my life, though.”
Still, he did plenty of TV commercials at a young age, including one for Smurfberry Crunch and another for Activision’s Pitfall! video game. That gig, which he got at age 13, came thanks to a higher power: Black had made a deal with the Almighty that if he got the Pitfall! commercial, he’d never ask to act or be on TV again. “I thought that I would be happy if the kids could just see me on TV once, that that would be enough,” Black says. “But I had to renegotiate. I was really hungry for the laughs and the attention. I wanted to stick out from the crowd. I wanted to be the fascinating person on the inside of the crowd -- there probably was some kind of insecurity that was driving that -- so I tried to figure out ways to get people to laugh.”
He still does. Mainly, Black relies on the element of surprise to get a laugh. On a movie set, he hopes to surprise the director and the other actors by playing a scene just a little differently than how they might expect him to, or, for that matter, than how he might expect himself to do it.
“I don’t like to go to the director, or whoever, and say, ‘You know what will be funny? If I do blah, blah, blah, blah,’ ” Black says. “Because as you’re saying that, the funny thing is losing all its power. So instead, you just think of a funny approach and you hold that in your brain pan and you say, ‘Let’s do another take. Let me try another one.’ Don’t even say you have an idea. Then they roll the camera, and you do it for the first time. That has a good chance of surprising you, because even though you’ve thought about it, that’s the first time you’ve heard yourself say it out loud.”
Suddenly, he stops talking. I assume he’s about to yawn -- again. Instead, he’s just realizing that it’s awfully hard to explain funny. “This is sounding very convoluted,” he says, finally. “But that’s that. That’s funny.”
Ingredient Two:
A healthy dash of playing that same guy, even if that guy is covered in black-and-white fur
You hear actors say it all the time: They love losing themselves in a character, love getting the chance to pretend to be so many different types of people. But it’s rare to see Jack Black in a role that doesn’t kind of remind you of, well, you know, Jack Black. Even in that commercial for Pitfall!, when he was shouting out, “Just last night, I was walking through the jungle with Pitfall Harry, surrounded by giant scorpions and man-eating crocodiles,” you can see the over-the-top style that would eventually become School of Rock’s goofball rocker-turned-teacher Dewey Finn. Esquire recently said this about the similarity of Black’s characters: “In theory, such lack of range should get old in a hurry.”
Except that it hasn’t. In fact, Black’s 2006 comedy Nacho Libre brought in nearly as much at the box office as School of Rock did three years earlier. And, indeed, Black makes no apologies for the way he’s played his most popular roles. “I like to play it close to the vest,” he says. “I’m just not the kind of actor who does something different all the time. I’m not constantly looking for a different accent or a different body type or shape. I’m not a chameleon as much as I am a situational actor.”
Then again, for Kung Fu Panda, Black has to play a giant animal. So you’d think that in that role, for which animators get to choose what his character will look like, he’d be very different from the cook-turned-wrestler Nacho Libre. And you’d be wrong.
“With animation, it’s the same process as with any film,” Black says. “You think about the emotions behind the lines and what this character is going through. Then you get there and you do the lines, and you also riff on it for a while and see where you can take it.”
So did he picture himself as a giant panda while reading the dialogue? “No, I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t do that at all. I just imagined that it’s a person. Because even though you’re playing a panda, you’re really playing a person. You’re speaking English. You’re living with very human thoughts and dreams. So I didn’t actually [ask myself] anything like, How would I do this if I were 100 pounds heavier and really furry?”
Ingredient Three:
A few dramatic roles, to taste
Black was well received in 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, in which he had a dramatic role -- kind of. He did still don a Nachoesque mustache and bare his backside to comedic, and highly uncomfortable, effect in the film. But he also cried his guts out on camera, which is not something he’s pushing to do more of anytime soon. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy the challenge; it’s that he just doesn’t feel as sure about drama.
“With comedy, it’s a little easier to know when I’m doing something effectively,” Black says. “If I make myself laugh, that’s good. But if I make myself get the shivers because something was so real or emotional, that’s not quite as definitive to me. Funny is more tangible. I know what’s going to get a laugh. But I don’t know if any given scene is going to be effective emotionally.”
Still, Black wants to keep mixing the occasional dramatic role in with his comedies. Just for the sake of, well, getting the recipe right. “I like doing both comedy and drama because it is good to do something different,” he says. “It’s just like how you want to eat different meals. You don’t want to settle in and say, ‘Well, I’ve found it. The Big Mac is the best meal, so I’ll just have those for the rest of my life.’ ”
Ingredient Four:
A final splash of Wikipedia
It has been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Neither approach makes much sense. Nor does analyzing comedy. What makes a person funny? Why does he or she make you laugh? In the case of Black, you could say it’s his silly antics, his booming voice, his gut-forward posturing, his ability to raise and lower his eyebrows independently of each other. Or you could define Black’s comedic style in the way someone did on Wikipedia:
“Black’s comedic style combines many key elements from both sides of the traditional double act. Black typically begins a skit in which he presents an earnest introduction to a premise or subject that quickly reveals itself to be flawed or fundamentally ludicrous. Black then switches completely to a far-extreme caricature of human emotion.”
I read this to Black during our conversation, and it throws him completely off. I have to read it twice before he grasps that this is a real analysis of his comedic stylings, not a joke.
“Wow,” he says. “I really should do more of that double act. That sounds good.” Actually, Black figures that he might really engage in a little “far-extreme caricature of human emotion,” at least in his comedic musical career as one-half (with partner Kyle Gass) of Tenacious D. But he doubts that “the traditional double act” is what makes him funny. Then again, ask him what does make him funny and he’ll struggle to answer. After thinking about it for a while, he offers, in his über-authoritative deep voice, “I’m funny because I want to be.” Then, more seriously serious, Black adds, “It goes back to when I was a kid. I wanted people to laugh. I was not always getting laughs, though. It was the desire to get laughs that got me to figure out ways to get them. And that’s something I’m still trying to do.”
JOE GUINTO imagined himself as a black-and-white furry panda while writing this story. We’re serious.
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