Jack Black names the single greatest scene of his career: “It felt very true to me”
Having appeared in well over 50 movies since making his feature-length bow in Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts back in 1992, Jack Black has had plenty of opportunities to perform scenes that will linger in his memory as his finest work in front of the camera.
From the outside looking in, those opportunities have been pretty thin on the ground recently, since most of his recent pictures have been crap. The meta Anaconda reboot, A Minecraft Movie, the dismal Borderlands, and the instantly forgettable Dear Santa have hardly been feathers in his filmic cap.
In a way, that might be his own fault. Black’s overzealous, boisterous, and endlessly exuberant onscreen persona has become so established that either he isn’t interested in branching out, or nobody’s offering him the chance to do it, despite the evidence suggesting that there’s an untapped dramatic talent there.
His Golden Globe-nominated performance in Richard Linklater’s Bernie is the most obvious example, and with his schtick running the increasing risk of becoming staler than ever and overstaying its welcome, perhaps it’s time for the Tenacious D frontman to make a sustained push toward more serious fare, especially when he’s inching closer to 60 years old, and you can’t play man-children forever.
Then again, if he’s getting paid millions to play Jack Black, then why wouldn’t he want to play Jack Black? Fittingly, the movie he’s repeatedly called the best he’s ever been in, and features the performance he’s repeatedly called the best he’s ever given, was written specifically for him, which makes it the Jack Black-iest turn of them all by default.
More than 20 years after its release, he can’t see beyond Linklater’s School of Rock as his magnum opus, and he’s probably right. He hasn’t been in many better flicks, if he’s been in any at all, so it makes complete sense that the absolute pinnacle of his acting career would contain the single greatest scene he thinks he’s ever been a part of.
When he was posed that very question by Vanity Fair, there was only one answer. “I liked in School of Rock when I had the heart-to-heart about my weight issues,” he replied. “That felt like a good scene. I guess because it felt very true to me.” As mentioned, it’s hard to write a movie for Jack Black and not have Jack Black find himself deeply connected to the character.
In the scene in question, Dewey Finn offers a helping hand to Maryam Hassan’s Tomika with her confidence and image issues. The student has her reservations about performing because she thinks she’s fat, with her teacher invoking the name of not only Aretha Franklin, but himself.
He tells her that he also has a weight issue, but it doesn’t matter because “once I get up on stage and start doing my thing, people worship me because I’m sexy and chubby, man!” It’s a brief exchange, but one that’s burned into Black’s memory as the best scene of his career.
