12 Facts About Jack Black We Just Found Out (2024)

Photo: @jackblack / Instagram

His Mother, A NASA Scientist, Worked Through A Problem For The 'Apollo 13' Mission While In Labor With Jack

Like her son, Judith Love Cohen was a multifaceted person. After growing up in Brooklyn, she danced professionally for the New York Opera Ballet. She was the eighth woman to be accepted into UCLA's engineering program and completed her undergrad and master's degrees during the same 10 years she had three children.

After graduating, she joined Space Technology Laboratories where she worked on the Abort-Guidance System (AGS) in the Apollo Lunar Module. She was pregnant with Jack in 1969 when the moon landing happened. Her condition did not stop her from her work

In 2021, Black and his half-brother Neil Siegal, went on the Periodic Talks podcast to talk about their mom. Siegal recalled to his brother and the hosts about the day Black was born:

She literally showed up at work the day that you were born. She was working on some problem and when it was time to go to the hospital, she took the computer printout with her. Later that day, [her boss] called her and she was working on some problem. She said, “I solved the problem. Oh yeah, and by the way, the baby was born.”

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Most people know Mike White from his award-grabbing universally beloved limited series The White Lotus. However, he has also written several big-screen comedies, including Nacho Libre and School of Rock. He also played Ned (the substitute teacher Jack Black's character pretends to be) in School of Rock.

One of Black's first major starring roles came in the 2002 comedy Orange County, which was written by White and produced by Scott Rudin (who would also produce School of Rock).

White, who lived next door to Black in Los Angeles, explains how his neighbor gave him the idea to write School of Rock:

Jack was my next-door neighbor for a few years. He was starting to get a lot of heat as an actor and he would occasionally give me scripts that had been submitted to him to star in. They were invariably these flat comedies or he was like the John Belushi guy who gets drunk and falls through a sliding glass door or something.

I'm reading these scripts and I was like, “I could do better than this.” Obviously, music is a big passion of his; he has his band Tenacious D. I had the idea of him leading a band of little kids - somehow it just seemed like a funny visual. Then I got the idea that it would be fun to have him be more of a W.C. Fields a little bit, like a guy who isn't really somebody you'd want around kids, but that's part of the fun of it.

Photo: @jackblack / Instagram

He's Been Nominated For Three Grammys, And Won Once

If you've seen School of Rock, it's no secret that Jack Black is a talented musician. In fact, his work on that film was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media in 2003.

He would be nominated again in 2012, this time in the Best Comedy Album category for Tenacious D's “Rize of the Fenix.” They finally won the golden gramophone two years later for Best Metal Performance for their cover of Dio's "The Last in Line." The song appears on “Ronnie James Dio – This Is Your Life,” a tribute album to the late titular metal icon.

Black credits their win on a recorder solo Gass performs late in the song's runtime:

The end of it opens a portal to hell. It rips a hole in the space-time continuum.

Photo: Foo Fighters / YouTube

Many fans of the “D” know that Foo Fighter and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl has played the drums on all four of their albums, Tenacious D, The Pick of Destiny, Rise of the Fenix, and Post-Apocalypto. Their friendship began at LA's Viper Room, before Grohl heard the band play a set in the mid '90s. Black recalls:

[Dave Grohl] f**kin’ somehow popped his head through the curtain when we were playing the Viper Room in the early ’90s and said, “Hey, I heard you guys were great. Looking forward to checking you guys out. Have a good show tonight."

Grohl obviously liked what the two brought musically. He not only played on their albums but appeared in their “Tribute” music video and in the film Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny as the devil himself. Before all that though, Black admitted to Heavy Consequence that they were nervous to ask him to participate:

We didn’t even want to ask him to play drums for us on that first album, because it just seemed too stupid a question. But (producers) the Dust Brothers actually convinced us, (saying), “Are you f** kin’ crazy? He said he liked you? You’re going to trytoget him on the album!"

That nervousness eventually went away and the Foo Fighters and Tenacious D are great friends now, even touring together. The latter even appeared in the “Learn to Fly” and “Low” music videos.

Photo: JablinskiGames / YouTube

For years fans of Jack White and Jack Black were hoping the two would come together in some capacity. As documented in the latter's YouTube video, “Jack Gray,” the two finally made it happen.

Black and his Tenacious D bandmate were invited to White's Third Man Records for a tour and then to the former White Stripes home studio to crank out a new number. As Black told Jimmy Kimmel in 2019, this was very intimidating for the group, so they channeled their anxiety into their new song:

He's a legend. He's my idol. I love Jack White but there was also this terror because you don't want to let Jack White down. So we were like, “What are we going to do? We can't just go record one of our old songs. We got to write a new song.” So we wrote a song about how terrified we were to go rock for Jack White.

The resulting song, “Don’t Blow It, Kage” premiered during the COVID-19 lockdown, with a homemade music video directed by Black's son, Sammy.

Photo: JablinskiGames / YouTube

He Didn't Learn To Play Guitar Until He Was 23

When Jack Black and Kyle Gass first met, the Kung Fu Panda actor just sang. He couldn't even play guitar. That's hard to believe now, as Black has an entire other career with Gass in the comedy metal band Tenacious D. Together their band has put out four albums, a TV series, and the feature film Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.

In an interview with Guitarings, Black revealed that Gass was the one to teach him to play guitar, years into their friendship. He paid him back by buying him his guitar and all-he-could-eat Jack-in-the-Box:

You were very patient with me, just listening to me play [the] D [chord], A, and E… It was too late really, to start playing guitar. I was 23…Turns out you can start whenever you want.