Jack Black

Comedy god, rock god… audiences have been worshipping at the temple of Jack Black for more than two decades. With a new Tenacious D album and fantasy film The House With A Clock In Its Walls both imminent, Total Film finds out what makes him tick.

- James Mottram

Who makes your shirt?” Jack Black has just clocked TF’s short-sleeved red-and-white check number and seems impressed. “It looks cool.” If he’s trying to win over his interviewer in a charm blitz, it’s working. He’s currently sporting jeans, a baseball cap with a ‘Los Feliz’ logo and a pink shirt with tigers printed on it. “I don’t know who made this,” he says, before pausing. “I have a person that picks shirts for me.”

He is joking, of course – something the 48-year-old Black does rather well. From his hilarious hysterical teen ‘girl’ in the recent Jumanji reboot via his Golden Globe-nominated turn in School Of Rock to the comedic songs belonging to his longrunning band Tenacious D, formed with Kyle Gass, his cohort from The Actors’ Gang theatre company, Black has been making fans chuckle for as long as they can remember.

Yet Black – who was born in LA and raised by his parents, two satellite engineers who divorced when their son was 10 – is just as adept in drama. Think of the groom-to-be in Noah Baumbach’s Margot At The Wedding or the filmmaker Carl Denham in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong or the murdering funeral director in Bernie, a role that garnered him a second Globe nod.

A father of two boys, Samuel and Thomas, with his musician wife Tanya Haden, Black is also particularly adept at kids’ movies. Take his latest, The House With A Clock In Its Walls, co-starring Cate Blanchett. Adapted from the 1973 novel by John Ballairs, it’s being directed by Eli Roth (yes, he of the Hostel torture-porn movies). Black plays Jonathan Barnavelt, a saxophone-playing, fez-wearing warlock who lives in a house with – you guessed it – a clock in its walls.