The Leonardo DiCaprio performance Jack Black hated: “That really bad movie”
He might be best known as a comedian, but Jack Black has given his fair share of excellent dramatic performances over the years. He plays director Carl Denham in Peter Jackson’s interpretation of King Kong, bringing a more serious edge to the role originally played by Robert Armstrong. Then there’s Richard Linklater’s Bernie, which sees Black play the titular character who gets accused of murdering his wealthy, elderly companion.
He’s also worked with some of the all-time great dramatic performers—mostly in the Kung Fu Panda series, for some reason. Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Viola Davis, and Gary Oldman—all Academy Award-winning greats—have lent their voices to various animated animals in the popular martial arts franchise. Black’s character, the lovable Po, has two fathers in the series: his adoptive father, Ping, voiced by the great James Hong, and his biological father, Li Shan, brought to life by Bryan Cranston.
The Breaking Bad star was the subject of an interview Black gave to The Fix in 2016. Cranston had recently been nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars for his performance as the title character in Trumbo, but lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio, who famously scooped his first statuette for The Revenant. Most people were thrilled to see Leo finally get his hands on the little gold man, but Black felt very differently.
“He was never going to win it against Leo DiCap in The Revenant,” he said. “’You heard it here. Bryan Cranston is better [at] acting than Leo DiCap. But, Leo DiCap was like dying a lot, he was like wheezing and coughing blood… That’s Oscar. That’s what you’ve got to do.” He would go on to refer to the film as a “really bad movie”.
Black is referring to DiCaprio’s Oscar-bait performance as Hugh Glass in Alejandro G Iñárritu’s frontier drama. Inspired by true events, DiCaprio’s character battles wildlife, the cold, and his fellow humans while exploring the Great Plains of 19th-century America. The star went to extreme lengths to prepare for the role, reportedly living like Glass to the extent of eating raw meat and sleeping inside animal carcasses. His victory ended a long-running joke that he would never win an Oscar, even though he had only been nominated five times before. Peter O’Toole and Glenn Close would scoff at that sort of number.
While Black isn’t entirely wrong about this performance being too transparent, it’s not like Cranston wasn’t clearly gunning for an award, either. As Dalton Trumbo, the famous screenwriter who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, the star ticked all sorts of boxes to make the Academy go gaga. He played a real-life figure with a tragic past in a movie surrounded by famous supporting players. You can argue whether or not Cranston is ‘better’ than DiCaprio till the cows come home, but even Black would have a hard time defending his Trumbo performance against the same accusations he flung at poor old Leo.
At the time of writing, Trumbo remains Cranston’s only Oscar nomination. While he’s probably very happy going to sleep at night next to his pile of Emmys, it would be interesting to know if his on-screen son has calmed down over this perceived injustice or if he still thinks he was robbed by that guy from Titanic.
