(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 3 September 2025 18:45, UK
Even though he’s spent most of the last 25 years playing himself more than any other character, Jack Black has a surprisingly wide-ranging and eclectic taste in films, at least relative to his status as one of Hollywood’s most typecast stars.
Of course, having carved out a successful secondary career as a musician, he’s fond of some films that revolve around screeching guitars and thundering drums, with Spinal Tap at the top of the pile as far as comedy is concerned, but he’s also got a soft spot for some of the classics.
Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, and Peter Sellers are three of his favourites, and the last one is pretty ironic, considering Sellers was the man of a thousand faces and voices, whereas Black playing someone who isn’t suspiciously Jack Black-like is something of a rarity, especially in recent years, where adhering rigidly to type has become his default setting.
He’s got a soft spot for sci-fi and dystopia, too, and it’s fair to say his favourite flicks in that arena, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, and A Clockwork Orange, are a damn sight better than his own contributions to the genre in Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man and Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.
Horror isn’t something Black has dabbled in too often, with an uncredited role in the slasher sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the two family-friendly Goosebumps films, and Eli Roth’s similarly PG-rated The House with a Clock in Its Walls as far as he’s gone, but it turns out that one of the finest spine-tingling pictures ever made happens to be the greatest thing he’s ever seen.
“My favourite movie of all time is The Shining,” he declared. “There’s just something great about being scared. I don’t know the scientific reasons for it, but there’s an exhilaration, an exploration of what it is to be alive. It’s very heavy, it’s very deep, being scared, and I see it in my kids.”
When AV Club asked him the exact same question, he didn’t budge: “I’m going to go with The Shining,” he said. “Because I really love The Shining.” As far as explanations for someone’s favourite movie goes, it’s not the most illuminating, but he did at least answer the question and put Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece at the head of the pack.
Not everyone really loves The Shining, with Stephen King far and away its most vocal opponent, but most people would agree that Kubrick’s slow-burning descent into madness, despair, and existential dread is among the best horrors ever committed to film. Knowing that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is another one of Black’s favourites, he’s clearly a fan of his namesake, Jack Nicholson, as well.
Having named John Malkovich and Christopher Walken among the actors he idolised growing up, throwing Nicholson into the mix makes it clear that the Tenacious D frontman prefers his actors to possess a wild-eyed mania, simmering intensity, and the unshakeable feeling that they can fly off the handle at any moment, sensibilities he’s brought to precisely zero of the characters he’s played onscreen, which is nothing if not weird.
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