Jack Black: Monkey business

He cornered the market in hard-rocking metal obsessives, becoming one of America's best-loved comic actors. But now Jack Black is taking on something far more serious: a 50ft ape called King Kong.

Like most successful people, ask Jack Black his recipe for making it to the top and he'll tell you to do it just the way he did. "Be a writer or a director. Be the one who pulls the strings. Don't just be a puppet in someone else's thing," is his advice for aspiring actors. "I never would have got this going if I hadn't done some writing and directing of my own. If not for my band Tenacious D, I wouldn't have got High Fidelity. Without that I'd never have done The School of Rock. So I attribute all my success to having taken a more active role in other things."

Black can afford to reflect on his changing status. Before playing the music-obsessed Barry in the film version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, he and his friend Kyle Gass were mainly "taking a more active role" in Tenacious D, a Spinal Tap-esque comedy-rock band consisting of Gass and Black on dual guitars. The D, as the pair are affectionately known, sing frat-boy-funny songs that, were they the only thing Black ever did, would still have him marked as a very funny man able to make a decent living out of one great persona - the born-to-rock heavy-metal obsessive who can lose himself in graphic novels, fantasy-adventure games and listening to songs about Satan and becoming a Rock Love God (and in the D's world, it goes without saying that such terms take capital letters).

But Tenacious D is not all that Jack Black does. He also acts in movies, and very successful he is at that too. The School of Rock cemented his reputation as a safe-but-edgy leading man and in all his major roles to date Black has somehow blended the inner teenage imp with a man on the verge of emotional maturity. And if the performances seem perfectly natural, that's probably because these roles are not really any great stretch for the "real" Jack Black.

Aside from "Shallow Hal guy", which was "more the Farrelly brothers' sense of humour" than his own, Black is immensely proud of all the "guys" he has played so far. But next week sees this most unlikely of Hollywood leading men taking things to a whole new level, with a starring role in Peter Jackson's first film since completing the Lord of the Rings trilogy: a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. And, no, he's not playing the ape, thank you. And yes, he has heard that one before. But when Jackson (who was given $20m, the highest salary ever paid to a director up front) asked him if he might be interested in the part of the obsessive film-maker Carl Denham, Black jumped at the chance to work with one of his heroes. "I can do obsession," he told Jackson, and the deal was done.

Despite spending seven months ("I could have made three movies in that time") in New Zealand filming, the real magic in Jackson's films tends to happen when the live action is wrapped and the computer animators set to work. So Black has yet to watch the finished film and can't wait to see the actor Andy Serkis's performance, covered in "hundreds of electrodes", as he is CGI'd into the titular ape (Serkis is an old hand at this, having already been the animation marker for Gollum in Lord of the Rings). f

Today, just a stone's throw from his current home and a short drive from where he grew up, Black is at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel where he is giving interviews to the world's press ahead of King Kong's release. He is sporting a small strand of facial hair that runs vertically from his lower lip to his chin and is relaxed and dressed in every-Joe clothes of jeans and a Ben Sherman shirt. His eyes have a slightly unfocused thing going on that might be disconcerting if he wasn't so cuddly looking, and he speaks in a dry, quiet, slightly monotone manner except when he wants to say something funny. At those moments, Black will switch to a way of speaking that can only be described as a larger-than-life, out-of-this-world Comedy Demonic-Possession Voice. It's a blend of Dr Evil's "One million dollars" riff from Austin Powers and the way a comedian might talk to Satan: "Tell me what to do, Lord. Tell me what to do ..."

So a typical Q&A with Black might go something like this:

German journalist, one of eight writers sitting at what the film company calls an "international press round-table interview": "You are, if you don't mind me saying, a bit of an oddball. And now you are getting parts in King Kong. Do you sometimes think, 'What is happening to me?' "

Black: "Well, obviously [adopts Comedy Demonic-Possession Voice], I am the Chosen One and the Lord loves me..."

Which is not to say that Black isn't capable of a normal conversation. It's just that he won't necessarily say anything particularly funny over the course of one. One to one, in a quiet room away from the gathered press pack, Black is fully prepared to dig a little deeper when reflecting on this exceptional run he is on. So Jack, have you moved to the mainstream or has the mainstream moved to you?

"You know, um, I don't give too much thought to that side of this business. I think that comedies have gotten more popular but the clowns have never been that mainstream. Jerry Lewis wasn't a mainstream kind of guy, but he was the most popular comedian in the world at one point."

Yes, but Jerry Lewis didn't have a sideline in potty-mouthed, heavy-metal bands.

"That's true."

So might there be a clash if, say, kids see you in Kong and then go and search out such Tenacious D classics as "Fuck Her Gently" or the memorably titled "Cock Pushups"?

"Well, there is, you know, a Parental Advisory sticker on the Tenacious D album. And, anyway, I don't think bad language is what harms children's psyches. I think what hurts kids is exposure to violence or not getting enough love. Those are the real things. I'm not a big fan of that Christian puritanical bullshit; you know, telling people sex is bad. I'm going to put out an R-rated Tenacious D film next year and I'm not worried about kids sneaking in. There's nothing in there that can harm them."

Your School of Rock character would no doubt have put Tenacious D on the curriculum ...

"[Cue Comedy Demonic-Possession Voice] In the Utopian society that is to come ..."

This may sound like a relaxed and modern attitude to what really amounts to little more than a healthy dose of playground swearing, but in Hollywood right now, this is fighting talk. Lining the highways from the airport to Beverly Hills, are any number of billboards advertising a local radio station called 870 KRLA. The slogan on the poster reads plainly: "Liberals might not like it". "I know, I know," Black groans. "There's a real conservative movement going on all over the place, but especially in this country, right now. It's weird, if you take the words 'liberal' and 'conservative', I always thought it was conservative that was the shitty one, with all sorts of negative associations."

This open-mouthed open-mindedness is key to Black's on-screen and off-screen charm. In The School of Rock's Dewey Finn, Black found a role early on that nailed his position as the subversive misfit with a heart of gold - exactly the sort of person the kids in the film need to teach them the lesson that there may be more to life than, well, lessons. It isn't the age-old battle between good and evil but it is, at the f very least, the not-quite-as-old battle between being good and learning to "party", as Black himself might put it.

"The first rule of rock," Finn/Black tells his classroom of squeaky clean, uptight and slightly bemused 12- to 13-year-olds, "is sticking it to the Man. And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man," he further informs them. "It was called rock'n'roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV!"

If you want to know where the manic energy that Black brought to his School of Rock performance came from, all you have to do is talk to him about what he was doing around the time that MTV was just starting to "ruin" his beloved rock.

In various biographical sources there is reference to Black having spent time at what is described as a "high school for troubled youths". Brought up in a solid, middle-class Jewish household, how exactly - at 14 years old - did Black find himself in such a situation? "I took some drugs in high school," he says. "I was doing cocaine and I was too young. What the hell was I doing? And I sniffed some glue. I was on a rampage. Also, there was this guy at my school who wanted to kill me 'cos I made out with a girl he liked, so by about 15 I was in full meltdown. I was really searching for a father figure and I hooked up with a really bad crowd. My parents realised I was in trouble, so they pulled me out of high school and put me in this school where there were, like, 20 pupils and a therapist."

Your parents? Didn't you just say that you were searching for a father figure? Wasn't your dad around back then?

For the first and only time in the course of our conversation, Black - who could ramble on about most subjects until you stopped him - is lost for words. This is exactly how he replies: "There is dad. I don't know why he wasn't, er ... Yeah. I don't know why he wasn't, er ... but he was there. Er, my dad was a good dad but he, um, I'm just sort of ... For some reason I wished that I had a Harley-Davidson-riding heavy-metal dad, and that's what I went to find."

Did you try the therapy on offer to you at this point? "Some of the more intense kids were going in every day and I was, like, what happens in there? So I went in one day and said, 'Can I have therapy?' and he said, 'Sure, sit down.' "

Black recounts the experience as if looking back on a day at the spa: "I don't remember exactly how it went down, but I started confessing - 'cos as a Jew you don't have confessional, so I had years of guilt - and I told him about how I stole money from my mom to get coke, and I just cried and cried and cried my eyes out. Came out a different guy one hour later. Soooooo good."

And is he still the guy who came out, cleansed and purged, from that room? "I don't know," he admits. "I like to think that I'm not at odds with myself but I know that I still hide things." These days, Black admits only to "partying very soft and very rarely". And you can read into that what you like.

It was at around the time of that therapy session that Black started tapping into his natural skills of acting, comedy and improvisation. "I realised then that, for the most part, I really liked being in the limelight, for some insecure reason," he says. This was clearly a pivotal moment in his life and it still seems to be the point that he goes back to when channelling the obsessive guys he has made his own. But King Kong is a departure in many ways, not least because it is Black's first period piece (Jackson's remake, Black prefers the term "cover version", like the original, is set in the 1930s), which means that Black had to wear a rather fetching wig and also needed to be told by Jackson whenever he was "hamming it up too much".

Neither of which are things that would have happened during the making of Black's first post-Kong project (also completed, and due for release next year). Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny is the kind of project that actors only get to make when they have become as successful as Black is right now. It's a vanity project, albeit one that sounds pretty funny, that tells of his and Gass's band going off in search of a legendary guitar plectrum that "all the greatest bands in the history of time have used". If the D can only find this pick, they will be the Monster Rock Gods they already imagine themselves to be and all, no doubt, will be right with the world.

Black would love to talk about the D all day, but conscious of the fact that he is the "participating talent" for this round of King Kong publicity, we return to the matter in hand. Was there ever a temptation to set Kong in the modern day, with your character, say, representing America, and the benign creature turned monster representing, well, take your pick from any one of Bush's "rogue states"?

"Logistically," he says, clearly having given the matter some thought, "if you come at Kong with an F14 and shoot some missiles at him, he'd hit the deck instantly and that would make for a very short movie. But if you come at him with a Tommy gun and a bi-plane, he's got a fighting chance. He is not made of steel," he says, in that fallback, default comedy voice. "He is flesh and bone, just like you and me.

"And you know what it is about the 1930s?" he continues. "It's right at the cusp, you know, before the world was accounted for. That pre-World War II innocence was still there. But, you know, while I'm pretty sure Peter is not interested in doing a sequel, you should maybe talk to Universal because you might have touched on something there."

And with that, Black is off to meet another table full of journalists who will no doubt ask him, for the umpteenth time today, which he would choose if he had to decide between acting and playing with Tenacious D.

For now, though, Black is in the happy position of being able to reconcile one strand of his career with the other. He is that rare thing: the comedy actor who retains the air of the outsider while operating from deep within the system. A man who - even in a mainstream blockbuster, with his Rock God mane covered with a conservative 1930s wig - can't help but give the impression that he is still now, and probably always will be, somehow sticking it to the Man.

'King Kong' opens nationwide on 15 December