The Secret Plan of Jack Black

By Josh Tyrangiel

It's possible that in the next few hours Jack Black will become a father. "I'm sorry, but I have to keep my cell phone on," Black says. "My lady"--wife Tanya Haden, a musician--"is nine months preggy. I may need to pounce into action." A minute later, Black forgets the name of the dish he had for breakfast each morning while making his latest film, Nacho Libre, in Oaxaca, Mexico. This bothers him so much that he whips the phone open--"Sorry, I got to do this"--and calls a friend in Paris, who doesn't answer because it's 4 a.m. there. By the time he's tracked down someone who was on set and can refresh his memory--"Chilaquiles! Gracias, Roz!"--his phone is beeping wanly. "Mmmm, out of juice. That was pretty stupid."

If you've seen a typical Black performance--as the manic record-store clerk in High Fidelity, the manic but sweet wannabe rock star in The School of Rock or the manic and sadistic half of Tenacious D, the world's most delusional folk-metal duo--this might seem like a revelatory moment, as well as a good time to put in a call to child services. Black, 37, can be irresponsible and gross and all those other things associated with burly comics since John Belushi first belched his way into moviegoers' hearts. But for Black, chilaquiles moments are actually pretty rare. "We lived together during The School of Rock," says Mike White, who wrote Rock and co-wrote Nacho Libre, "and I can say Jack's surprisingly unlike his screen alter egos. He's really smart and effortlessly funny, but he's not a garrulous slob. There's a bit of that in him--he can access it when he wants it--but that's what acting is about."

Which is another way of saying that Black is a guy who's funny in movies rather than a funny guy who happens to be in movies. (Think of the difference between Bill Murray and Adam Sandler.) In Nacho Libre, out June 16, he plays a half-Mexican monk who starts wrestling to earn money for his order's beloved orphans. Because Black wears tights and has a physique like a throw pillow, many people have tabbed Nacho as this summer's Wedding Crashers--an over-the-top comedy poised to do big business. As directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), though, the $35 million film is more like Don Quixote set in the absurd subculture of Mexican wrestling than a traditional multiplex comedy. "Jack doesn't wink at the camera," says Hess. "He lives in the weird universe of the movie, so the funny stuff comes from him being the character, not the other way around."

It takes a specific kind of talent to pull off this type of performance, and it took Black almost two decades to figure out how to harness his talent successfully. "I first met him when he was 12," says Tim Robbins, who, as the co-founder of the Los Angeles theater troupe the Actors' Gang, gave Black a role in the play Inside Eddie Binstock. "After that, he just kept coming back and hanging out." Black's parents, divorced rocket scientists, encouraged their son's artistic hanging out, and as Black matured and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, he landed in Actors' Gang productions of Peer Gynt and The Good Woman of Setzuan; eventually Robbins recommended Black to his agent. "He was disciplined, professional," Robbins recalls. "As Jack would say, he could also bring the special sauce."

Black measures much of his life with condiments. (Of the tepid reviews for his performance in 2005's King Kong, he says: "Maybe I didn't bring the spicy mustard. I only brought some mild cheddar sauce.") With the exception of a brief but startling performance as an acolyte of the politician in Bob Roberts, directed by Robbins, Black feels most of his early movie roles were expired mayo. "I did a lot of puppet acting, jobs where I did whatever the director said," Black says of unmemorable stints in such films as Waterworld and The Jackal. He hates confrontation, and he's not arrogant enough to have ever told a director he thought he was being misused, but he did find that movies were a lot less fun than theater or Tenacious D, the Spinal Tap-ish band he created with fellow Actors' Gang alum Kyle Gass. "It wasn't about control," says Black. "It was about the co-lla-bo. There's great directors who treat actors like cattle, but I hated it, and I knew if I ever had a choice, I didn't want to work with those guys. Who said that thing about actors and cattle? Hitchcock? Yeah, I don't want to work with that dude."

Luckily for Black, Tenacious D became a cult phenomenon on HBO, which led to his getting cast in High Fidelity ("The first time I had any real power in a film performance," he says, crediting director Stephen Frears). When The School of Rock followed and made him one of a handful of people who might actually be able to carry a movie, Black moved forward with his plan to make movies fun. Nacho Libre is the first production by Black and White's Black & White Films--"and it's kind of a model of what we want to do," says Black. The movie came about because Black and White loved Napoleon Dynamite, so they called director Hess to see if he wanted to hang out. "There are a lot of people with unique voices out there," says Black. "Mike is a pretty unique writer, and I've got my thing going on, so let's cut out all the lame guys and see if we can't party."

Hess, 26, didn't have an idea for a movie, but after some record shopping and pizza he mentioned a fascination with the life of a Mexican priest named Fray Tormenta. (Yes, Nacho Libre is based on a true story.) Black said, "Dude, I'm in." "We didn't have a script or anything," says Hess, "but he was confident we'd come up with something good." Hess, who co-wrote the film with his wife Jerusha and Mike White, had never worked with a celebrity before, and when it came time to shoot, "I kind of beat around the bush if I wanted to change something. But Jack was just like, 'Hess, dude, tell me what you want.'" Says White: "He's not a Jim Carrey. He's not looking to improvise, and he finds it annoying when people say, 'Then you'll come in and do your Jack Black thing!' He wants real direction, he just wants to be able to contribute too."

For Black, Nacho Libre is more than just a chance to have a say; it's a shrewd career move. He gets to do things he knows audiences love--move his eyebrows like inchworms, sing goofy songs, make fart jokes--while trying his hand at difficult physical work as well (he performed most of his own stunts in the ring), delivering a few moving speeches in Mexican-accented English (which is funny without being too offensive) and producing. The biggest challenge, though, was getting used to seeing himself as Nacho. "At first I would have rather been naked to tell you the truth," Black says, "because I just look so goddang ridiculous. But then I thought, Wait, that's my job. The stretchy pants are my friends. I love the stretchy pants! It just took a little mental adjustment, because I know that when I'm embarrassed and scared about acting, that means I'm going to get some good life-nugget knowledge out of it. And I love the knowledge nuggets." They go down perfectly with the special sauce.