The icon Jack Black made three movies with and never met: “Not even a glance”
In terms of live action co-stars, Jack Black has racked up an impressive list of friends. The Holiday alone teamed him up with Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, and Jude Law, plus there’s also the likes of High Fidelity, Bernie, and the ‘Jumanji’ series to consider. As a voice actor, Black has arguably worked with even more stars. Take the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ franchise, for example.
Across four movies in which Black voices unlikely martial arts hero Po, he has faced villains played by Ian McShane, Gary Oldman, JK Simmons, and Viola Davis. His two fathers are voiced by James Hong and Bryan Cranston, whilst his mentor figure, Master Shifu, is brought to life by Dustin Hoffman. As for the Furious Five, a group of fellow kung fu masters that Po works alongside, they are voiced by Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Seth Rogen, and the legendary Jackie Chan.
In three of the four films, Chan plays Monkey, who is… well, he’s a monkey. A golden snub-nosed monkey, to be specific. The Five don’t have that much to do across the series and, even when they do, Monkey rarely gets to speak. Still, Black and Chan’s characters do interact across the franchise, marking the only time these two great actors from very different backgrounds have shared screen time. However, as revealed on an episode of Conan, they did so without ever meeting each other.
“We have worked together literally for ten years, side by side, on one of the most successful franchises of all time. But never met the man,” Black confessed in 2016. “Never so much as a high five; not even a glance from across the room. We have never been within hundreds of yards of each other.” This is one of the great things about animation; voice actors can provide their lines from anywhere in the world, running scenes with partners they’ve never even met. Black is based in the US, whilst Chan seems to split his time across various locations, including China and Hong Kong.
Whilst you wouldn’t immediately put the two together, Black and Chan actually have a lot in common. Both are highly skilled physical performers. Though he’s more famous as a man of action, Chan is an accomplished physical comedian too, regularly blending martial arts and slapstick to generate big laughs. Both come from unusual backgrounds; Chan’s father was a spy in pre-Communist China, while Black’s mother was a pioneering engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. They’ve both also provided songs for the soundtracks of many of their movies.
Black went on to reveal that, whilst he was in Shanghai promoting Kung Fu Panda 3, he and Chan met. “I’m doing a junket… then a dude comes up and says, ‘Mr Chan would like to speak with you.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I am following,’” he revealed. “We get to a special hotel suite penthouse. Jackie Chan is famous everywhere, but in Shanghai, he is like a god. And then I saw this man, and his aura was just glowing. We had like this powerful shake and we had like amazing eye contact, transferal of energies and he said, ‘Think of a movie; we’d do it.’”
As it stands, this collaboration has yet to happen, but one can only imagine what sort of mayhem these two will get up to when they finally get together in person.
