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Nov. 7 - Nov.14, 2004 |
A Very Tenacious Jack Black
American comic actor and musician takes on kids and rock 'n roll in School of Rock
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-10-05
Jack Black, the hefty 5-foot-6-inch, 34-year-old actor who's played the unpredictable, crass, potty-mouthed character in Shallow Hal, High Fidelity, Orange County and Saving Silverman, may not be the kind of guy you want to leave alone with your kids.
But in Richard Linklater's School of Rock, he does exactly that. The actor and musician, who is a member of the rock group Tenacious D, plays rock guitarist and vocalist Dewey Finn who is fired from his band and takes a job as a 4th grade substitute teacher at an uptight private school where his free-living lifestyle, attitude, music and antics soon influences the students to explore other sides of themselves the school doesn't encourage. Finn's real goal in taking the job is to recruit the musical prodigies to become his back-up band in a "battle of bands" contest. This would solve Finn's money problems and re-establish him as a respected rocker.
Tandem talked to Jack Black when he was in Toronto recently.
How much of this character is you?
"A lot. Actually I figured out exactly 87 per cent. (laughs) A lot is me and a lot is what I like to play, which is not necessarily me. But I really like to be intense and there's lots of good opportunities to be intensely passionate about the rock and about the secret inner meaning of rock, which is something that really appealed to me and something I could sink my teeth into. And also I had already been wanting to do something with kids. I wanted to do a TV show like a Pee Wee Herman-type show because I really missed when it was TV. That was the funniest show on TV. Not just for a kids show but, of all shows because although there's constraints put on you when you're working with kids, you can get really ridiculous in a way that isn't as appropriate for adult shows."
Were you concerned about losing the Jack Black edge being around kids?
"A little bit. I wasn't really worried about me losing my edge as much as the stigma of kids movies. If you say you're in a kids movie that automatically means nowadays you're in a crap movie 'cause all kids movies are shit except for a couple of cartoons which don't count. So I wanted to make sure that we didn't approach it tiptoeing around stuff that would normally be funny. Make it gentle-rock-a-bye-baby bullshit. Because it's not funny and I don't think kids think that it's funny either. In the olden times, in the 70s, there were some real asskickers like Bad News Bears. And I don't even think of that as a kids' movie, which it was. And Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a classic and even stuff like Meatballs, which was a Bill Murray masterpiece. These are great flicks and I was hoping to do stuff like that. You know, censorship has affected a lot of movies and I think kids movies the most because people are extra super-duper sensitive about kids. I think it's bad for kids because you might be protecting them from learning some bad words, which I don't think does much damage anyway, but you're hurting them from denying them actual funny stuff and that's doing more damage."
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