The director Jack Black would do anything to work with: “I would have interviewed for ‘Turds on Ice'”
While he’s worked with an accomplished list of directors throughout his career, Jack Black is unlikely to be a name high on the priorities list for many of the industry’s most esteemed auteurs for the sole reason that he’s Jack Black.
That’s not intended as a slight or an insult when the boisterous star has been a household name for almost a quarter of a century, but for the most part, Black tends to work best with filmmakers who either allow him to bring the best version of his signature shtick to the big screen or can convince him to tone it down in service of plot and character.
He’s made films under the direction of Tim Burton, Tony Scott, Stephen Frears, Michel Gondry, Harold Ramis, and several with Richard Linklater, but it’s been a long time since Black delivered anything that even remotely resembled a straightforward dramatic turn without letting the slightest hint of comedy seep into his performance.
That doesn’t mean he can’t do it, although it does indicate that either he doesn’t want to or the people writing such roles don’t think he’s capable of doing it. However, when Black made a rare detour into straight-laced acting, he would have done anything to be a part of it. Admittedly, it was a blockbuster with plenty of CGI and spectacle, but it didn’t require him to bust out his usual exuberance.
“I just wanted to party with Peter Jackson,” he told Radio Free of boarding the Academy Award-winning filmmaker’s first picture since he swept the board at the Oscars with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. “Honestly, that was like a secret goal of mine. And it was unbelievable. I didn’t think that I would be able to.”
Jack was so desperate to work with Jackson on anything that he instructed his agent to get him into one of the director’s films, whatever it may be. Coincidentally, he didn’t even need to put all that effort in when the New Zealander reached out to him directly and asked him to come and audition for King Kong.
To illustrate just how much he wanted to collaborate with Jackson, Black confessed that “I would have come and interviewed for Turds on Ice if he was directing it.” On the plus side, figure skating faecal matter wasn’t what the freshly-minted Oscar winner had in mind, instead handing Black the role of Carl Denham, which he called “one of the most amazing parts and incredible scripts I had ever read.”
In the end, he got his wish without a marketing department having to try and figure out a way to pitch Turds on Ice to the masses, which would be a hard sell even with Jackson and Black’s names attached.
