Jack Black

Jack Black has built a screen career around a rare combination of full-volume comedy, musical instinct and surprising dramatic control. Born Thomas Jacob Black in Santa Monica on August 28, 1969, he excelled in drama at Crossroads School and later attended UCLA, leaving during his second year to pursue entertainment. He joined the Actors’ Gang in 1987, and fellow UCLA student Tim Robbins eventually cast him in Bob Roberts. After a run of smaller film and television parts, Black found his breakout role as the wildly opinionated record-store employee Barry in High Fidelity. The part made excellent use of his ability to turn musical enthusiasm into comic momentum, a quality that became central to his starring performance in School of Rock. That film earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy and showed how comfortably he could carry a movie without sanding down his restless energy. Black has rarely stayed in one lane. He played filmmaker Carl Denham in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, took a romantic role opposite Kate Winslet in The Holiday and delivered a more subdued performance as Bernie Tiede in Richard Linklater’s Bernie, earning a second Golden Globe nomination. His comedy has also powered Nacho Libre, Tropic Thunder and the Jumanji films, while his voice work includes Po across the Kung Fu Panda franchise and Bowser in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Music is not a side note to Black’s acting persona. As lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Tenacious D alongside Kyle Gass, he has carried the theatrical force of rock performance into his film work. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny brought those worlds together, with Black serving as star, co-writer and producer. Whether playing a rock obsessive, an anxious adventurer or an animated warrior, he commits physically and vocally, treating even the broadest joke as something worth playing all the way through.