Jack Black: ‘Cheeseburgers are my heroin’

Half an hour later, I’m ushered into his presence in another darkened room. He has a large Starbucks cup of iced tea, which he rests on his ample belly at contemplative moments. It draws the eye to the stretches of pale, hairy stomach protruding between his shirt buttons. Black, 46, is one of the most successful fat American actors for nearly a century, if you discount Marlon Brando, in what Black calls his “post-bloat” period; Oliver Hardy, whose success hinged on a double act; and Orson Welles, who died broke without seeing any of his films make a profit.

The man himself sees no reason to fix what isn’t broken. He has no desire to submit to an army of personal trainers and transform his physique, like the previously podgy Chris Pratt.

Jack Black with his wife, Tanya Haden, and son Thomas, October 2015

GETTY IMAGES

“I could, but who has time for all that crap?” he says. “Was I supposed to do that at four this morning before I took the kids to school? I don’t know how Gwyneth Paltrow does it. I have to have a sit-down, a heart-to-heart with Gwynnie.” There’s a thoughtful pause. “You know what? Hope springs eternal, but I don’t know that I want to Chris Pratt it out now. I think that could actually ruin my career. People will be like, ‘What happened to Jack? He used to be funny when he was fat.’ ”

The key is to be “healthy fat”, and Black is trying, but it’s a genuine battle to find the right balance with his own particular form of Hollywood excess. “I’m not an alcoholic. My vulnerability really is cheeseburgers. That’s my heroin. That’s seriously what I have to struggle with. That’s more of a threat to my life than anything else. That’s my addiction. If anything, I should go to Overeaters Anonymous.”

He has already survived a brush with more conventional movie star substance abuse problems. After his aerospace engineer parents divorced when he was ten, his idyllic Los Angeles childhood turned very dark. By the time he was 14, he’d developed a hard drug habit and was stealing from his mother to fund it. “I was having a lot of troubles with cocaine,” he told Parade magazine last year.

“I was hanging out with some pretty rough characters. I was scared to go to school [because] one of them wanted to kill me.”

His parents enrolled him in Poseidon, a private school for “troubled youth” and a “place to press the restart button”, where a session with a school therapist turned his life around. “Listen, it was a weird … It was a weird, rough childhood where I was ... I was sort of searching for my identity in an extreme way,” he says. “I wanted to be tough and cool and a badass, just like most kids at a certain point want to rebel. I started a little earlier than most, but it wasn’t rough and tough like some of these kids in third world countries or war-torn nations – that’s real rough stuff. People who lose their parents or family members, let’s not make my thing [like that].”

Was he scared to go to school because of a death threat? “That’s true. Well, you know. Who knows what kids are really capable of? But that’s the way he made it seem.”

Black’s first session with the Poseidon school therapist “was a gigantic cathartic moment for me”. It “really helped me make peace with myself because I had a lot of guilt for having stolen money from my mother. It was a very healing time. I was very, very lucky to have met that person at that time, who could help me deal with the emotions of that thing. They say you’re only as sick as your secrets, and I had this secret guilt. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it, so I saw this therapist at the school and I was able to dump it all out and it was a huge thing for me. It was very important.”

In the same 2015 Parade interview, Black also talked about the “devastating” pain of losing his elder brother, Howard, to Aids in 1989. He looks uncomfortable being reminded of it. “I regret ever bringing it up because, once I brought it up, then that became the headline of everything. I can’t talk about it any more because my mom was like, ‘Why did you talk about that? That’s very personal.’ ”

Black was a “late bloomer” who lived at home well into adulthood. “I would live with my mom and then I would get a job, and I would say, ‘Goodbye, Mom. Now I’m ready. I’m leaving the nest. This time for real.’ But I came back and forth maybe six or seven times through my twenties.”

As a child, Black was obsessed with drawing monsters, along with other “things that I thought were cool – BMX bicyclists and bikers and skateboarders and surfers and animals”. He “liked to make people believe that I had magic powers”. The quirkiness and the performing instinct were evident early on. “It was all there, the blueprint of what I was going to become.”

Music was “the rocket fuel that got me started” on the path to stardom. Black’s career began to take off with Tenacious D, the overblown comedy rock band he formed with his friend Kyle Gass, and the door to Hollywood opened with a scene-stealing cameo as a music snob record store clerk in High Fidelity. (“Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You? Go to the mall!”) As a rock’n’roll-obsessed supply teacher in Richard Linklater’s 2003 triumph School of Rock, he gave a masterclass in how to act with ten-year-olds. Their delight in his presence is evident in every frame, and he’s friends with many of them still, but at the time he was single and convinced that parenthood was not for him.

Then two years later he went off to make King Kong and befriended Andy Serkis, who played the ape, and his family. “Here he was, doing this incredible performance in the movie and I was admiring him as an actor and seeing his relationship with his wife and kids,” says Black. “It seemed so nourishing and great and part of who he was. The cast was really close, and every weekend we would have a little gathering and everyone would bring their kids along and we’d be hanging out and I thought, ‘That looks like an amazing thing.’

“One day I was over at their house and they were putting the kids to bed and asked me if I wanted to read them a story, a bedtime story, and I was like, ‘Sure.’ It was a funny book about aliens – I can’t remember what it was called – and they were laughing and really looking over my shoulder at the pictures in the book and I thought, ‘This is great. I love this. I want to do this.’ That’s when my biological clock started ticking.” He arches an eyebrow. “It’s not just the ladies, you know.”

Shortly after that, he bumped into his future wife at a friend’s birthday party. They’d been at school together (after Poseidon), but never dated. She was “someone whom I had stalked and kept my eye on”, he jokes.

Did he tell her that he desperately wanted kids? He nods. “I was like, ‘I really want kids. Can I put them in you?’ She said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ ” He shakes his head. “No, that’s not how it went down at all.” They married in 2006 and have two sons, Thomas and Sammy.

The first Kung Fu Panda film arrived in 2008, when Black was “a full-grown dude”, but “still closer to my childish days”. Po is “very close” to the teenage Jack Black. “That’s what I think about when I’m portraying him. When he gets super-excited about his kung fu heroes and the legends of history, I think about my rock’n’roll heroes.”

He once described his Kung Fu Panda role as “the sweetest job. If you can get a kick-ass voice role in an animated classic, it’s about as good as it gets.” Plugging the sequel in Cannes in 2011, he said that it would have to do “gonzo record-breaking crazy money” to earn a follow-up, but that if it did, “I’d love to do it for the next 20 years.”

And here we are. The third instalment in the series is enormously enjoyable slapstick, with spherical cuddly pandas bouncing, rolling and flying through the action to defend their mountain village from a supernatural warrior. It is also a movie that DreamWorks hopes could change the business model for Hollywood blockbusters. No expense has been spared in creating a look and a script that will appeal to the cinema audience in China, and for the first time in film history, the Mandarin version of the film will be its own distinct product with separate animation work done to fit around the Mandarin voice cast.

But it’s still Black’s supersized personality that carries the franchise at home and abroad. The directors, Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni, overflow with enthusiasm for the mixture of professionalism and raw enthusiasm that Black brings to the job. “He was the inspiration to us very early on when we were first developing Po,” says Nelson.

He has “that sort of fan-boy nature [which Po shares], but also a real wonderful, warm, vulnerable side to him that makes him very accessible to the audience”. He’s also much more “physical” than most voiceover actors, Carloni adds, jumping around in the recording booth and making grunts and groans that help the animators design the performance.

Carloni pulls out his smartphone to show me pictures of Black and his son Sammy in the studio, recording Sammy’s cameo as a young rabbit in the film. Full-throttle Jack Black is instantly recognisable: red-faced and bug-eyed with a deranged grin.

Two months later, the Kung Fu Panda promotional machine is in full swing. I meet Black again in a Beverly Hills hotel suite. This time he’s more alert, curled up on a sofa in a dark blue and black check shirt and box-fresh Puma trainers, arching an eyebrow, with long swept-back hair, a dapper moustache and a small tufted beard under his lower lip.

I ask about working with the stellar voice cast on the film, including Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman. It turns out he hardly saw them. “It’s a very precise science these guys are working with, so unfortunately I don’t get to high-five Angelina Jolie every time I go into DreamWorks Animation.” Apparently, it’s easier for the animators if the actors record voice parts one at a time, mostly with the help of a theatre actor called Stephen Kearin who impersonates all the other characters.

“He does an amazing one-man show with the unfortunate title Inside Out, so if you look it up on the internet, you’ll never find it,” laughs Black. “Sometimes he’s not available. They’ll say, ‘We’re going to bring in, uh, Larry from accounts. He’s going to read the lines with you today.’ And I’m like, ‘No, he’s not. Let me know when Stephen’s available.’ He’s the unsung hero.”

Black is close to Jolie, though, and it’s a friendship that survived him accidentally giving away that she was having twins during an interview at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. “That was kind of an embarrassing thing.”

On the same trip, Black’s wife, Tanya, complimented Jolie on a “gorgeous maternity dress” she was wearing. “Then my wife, when I got her preggers, received in the mail a beautiful dress from Angelina Jolie. The same one.” The literal same dress? “Yeah. Is that a weird gift? It’s like, if you complimented my shirt and I took it off and gave it to you, would that be a gift you would savour?” I must look uncertain. “I guess my man essence is probably not as valuable as Angelina’s.”

Having grown up in Los Angeles, Black has a lot of movie industry friends. His children’s school is also crawling with famous parents, but, “I can’t tell you who because then they would be like, ‘Hey, why don’t you keep that s*** to yourself next time?’ ”

He likes having a foot in the music world as well as the film universe, and is “always” working on Festival Supreme, his comedy and music festival. This October he’s going to take up Sammy’s suggestion of staging a swear-word-free children’s edition the following day. Before that, he hopes to take in the hit School of Rock musical, which recently opened in New York, thanks to the decidedly unlikely combination of Conservative peers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Julian Fellowes.

He had dinner with at least one of them about a year before the opening. “Definitely Webber [was there]. But Fellowes? I think he was the other guy.”

Anyway, “I had nothing to do with this production, other than totally laying the groundwork. They’re going to make a billion. It’s fine. They deserve it. I’m excited to see it because, you know, it’s based on my best movie and people love it and it lives on through the Broadway stage. But I don’t like the idea of going in there and sitting down, and everyone in the f***ing theatre looking around and going, ‘Oh, Jack Black’s here. What does he think of School of Rock?’

“So I either have to go in disguise, or fly in there and have one of those opera boxes where the Queen would sit. And then at the end of the show I would just come out and I would go like this [he raises his thumb like a Roman emperor at the Coliseum]. And then everyone would applaud. But not until they see my thumb. If Andrew Lloyd Webber is reading this, my thumbs-up could possibly be influenced by a piece of the back end.”

And what will people say when they eventually look back on everything he’s done?

“They’ll just say that he was in School of Rock, and he was good in that. And that’s good enough. I like having fun now. I don’t think about my tombstone too much.”

Kung Fu Panda 3 is released on March 11