Jack Black names his favourite actors ever: “For a long time I was just doing imitations of them”
There isn’t another actor in the business quite like Jack Black, but he wasn’t always the exuberant showman cinema audiences and concertgoers have come to know and love.
Watching some of Black’s earliest big screen performances, it’s almost impossible to tell that he’d become a star and stay that way through his boisterous personality, never-ending energy, and infectious sense of enthusiasm. He’s unique, to say the least, but he was still shaped by his key influences.
Working his way up the ranks following his feature debut in Tim Robbins-directed satire Bob Roberts, Black kept popping up in the background of numerous projects, including Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, and Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man, before Stephen Frears and High Fidelity gave him his big break.
While his performance in the musically-inclined drama wasn’t quite as exaggerated or scenery-chewing as the many to come that only cemented his Hollywood stardom, it makes sense that the version of Black known the world over was formed in huge part by the three actors he called his all-time favourites.
Prime among them was, of course, John Malkovich, with Black never shying away from his admiration for the chameleonic star. While he was never destined to become an immersive character actor in an identical vein, his appraisal of his inspiration as “like the crazy guy from the desert” speaks volumes about his impact.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Black has played many crazy guys in his time, which was cribbed directly from the Malkovich school of charismatic outsiders. His expressive eyes, malleable body language, and penchant for a slapstick bout of comedy pratfalling are two more key weapons in his performative arsenal, which again are derived directly from the other two of his self-proclaimed holy trinity.
“My other favourites were Christopher Walken, Gene Wilder; these people who seemed like they had a screw loose,” he told Rolling Stone. “For a long time, I was just doing imitations of them.” In hindsight, it should be obvious that the legendary trio were integral to Black fine-tuning his own approach to acting because various strands of their individual DNA have been apparent in his output for years.
It wouldn’t stretch the imagination too far to suggest that Malkovich or Walken could have played the lead in Richard Linklater’s Bernie were it made in an era where either of them was more age-appropriate, nor is it ridiculous to suggest that Wilder would have the perfect Dewey Finn if School of Rock had been a product of the 1970s.
Black probably couldn’t play Willy Wonka – although it would definitely be a sight worth seeing – but Wilder could easily have a riotous time playing a teenage girl trapped in the body of an adventurer in a Jumanji sequel. He may have stopped ripping them off eventually, but the triumvirate remains pivotal in the Tenacious D frontman settling on the persona that’s served him so well.
