The story of how Harold Ramis was blown away by Jack Black: “I wasn’t even sure he was a real actor”
In 2009, Jack Black was directed by an absolute legend of comedy in a collaboration that had fans salivating at the prospect of what they had in store. Unfortunately, the movie was arguably the worst of either man’s career and the last film the beloved director ever made. Still, this didn’t dampen the enthusiasm either funnyman had about working with each other, and the director waxed lyrical in interviews about how blown away he was by Black the first time he saw him on film.
In fact, he was so stunned by Black’s double-threat approach to entertainment that he wasn’t even sure acting was his primary gig.
By the late 2000s, Harold Ramis’ career as an actor and a director seemed to be winding down. However, the legendary star, who co-wrote and starred in Ghostbusters and directed Groundhog Day, was still contributing to the comedy landscape. After all, he directed the neo-noir black comedy The Ice Harvest in 2005 before making memorable cameos in 2007’s Knocked Up and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. When an idea popped into his head that he couldn’t help laughing at, though, he began mounting what would become his final film before he passed away in 2014: the Biblical slacker comedy Year One.
As a self-proclaimed history buff with an interest in various religions, Ramis began thinking about how he would have acted in the Garden of Eden – and it made him chuckle. He told Movieline, “Would I have eaten that fruit? And I thought, ‘Why would I? In order to get laid? Well, yeah, I’d do that.'”
He then became convinced he would have been the world’s worst hunter-gatherer and concluded that there would surely have been other lazy members of an ancient tribe. He smiled, “There had to be some slackers. All that started to seem very funny to me.”
When Ramis began writing the script for the film and imagining who should play Zed, a disillusioned hunter who feels like he has no purpose in life, only one man came to mind. He had been aware of Black ever since his eye-catching supporting turn in High Fidelity, where his uncommon charisma and manic energy made him think, “He was so good and so convincing that I wasn’t even sure he was a real actor.”
When that film ended with Black on stage belting out Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On,’ Ramis was even more stunned. He thought Black must have been a musician trying his hand at acting. In disbelief, he said, “Wow, he can sing and play?”
From that point on, Ramis began tracking Black’s all-singing, all-dancing career. He marvelled at how the guy could be both a leading man in Hollywood and a globetrotting rock star with his band Tenacious D and was “amazed at how winning he is and how much fun he is to watch.”
Fascinatingly, Ramis even told a humbled Black that the Tenacious D song ‘Cosmic Shame’ influenced him while putting Year One together. When Black was asked about this by Movies, he said: “Yeah, that’s what he said to me and it’s very flattering…the idea in the song is that it’s about following your heart. Sometimes, you’ll follow your heart, and it won’t lead to anything, but you have to try. You have to try because if you don’t, you’ll always regret it.”
While Black joked that Ramis probably claimed a love for ‘Cosmic Shame’ as a deal-sweetener to convince him to sign up for Year One, it was obvious that receiving such praise from an icon was meaningful. After all, Ramis’ films like Meatballs, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Stripes, and National Lampoon’s Vacation hugely influenced Black’s generation of comedic performers.
Thankfully, Black was clear that working on Year One wasn’t just about paying tribute to director Ramis alongside co-star Michael Cera. Instead, Ramis fostered an environment where nothing was off-limits, encouraging the actors to try anything in pursuit of a laugh. This approach led Black to take his cues from what he affectionately referred to as Ramis’ “snortle chortle”—a telltale sign that the director found something genuinely funny.
He grinned, “He’d be watching a take on the video monitor, and I would hear him laughing…Whenever I heard that, it fired me up, but I’d also be thinking, ‘Keep it down and don’t ruin the take.””
