(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 9 January 2026 17:30, UK
Back in 1982, at the age of 13, Jack Black appeared in his first TV commercial promoting the Atari video game Pitfall, thoroughly impressing his classmates, but he would just as quickly experience his first dose of backlash after his second gig as an advertising actor aired a few months later.
“Smurfberry Crunch,” Black recalled to the Associated Press back in 2003, referring to a short-lived, Smurfs-themed breakfast cereal he pretended to love in the commercial, “My stock plummeted at school”.
It’s a bit of a reach, maybe, but that Pitfall vs Smurfberry dynamic has basically been the story of Jack Black’s entire career. After scrounging around as a bit player for most of the ‘90s, the success of his rock-comedy group/TV series Tenacious D put him on the first rung of the fame ladder, leading to breakout stardom with 2003’s School of Rock. From that point forward, it’s been a zig-zaggy career of big highs in the forms of Tropic Thunder, Kung Fu Panda, Jumanji, A Minecraft Movie, with equally big fails, such as Year One, Gulliver’s Travels, Borderlands, and probably the new Anaconda film.
Even the beloved Tenacious D weren’t invulnerable to the constant movement of the tides, as the implosion of the band over Kyle Gas’ anti-Trump statements in 2024 brought heat on Black from both the Maga world and longtime D fans who’d felt he had abandoned his pal. And yet, here he is, still going strong more than 40 years after that Pitfall ad, a survivor of the very hazards that game had warned him about.
With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Black has a particular affinity for artists who deliver the goods, day after day, year after year, in the face of adversity and wavering critical and public opinion. As a rock n’ roll obsessive, he also holds no artists in higher esteem than the proud purveyors of Satan’s preferred genre of music, so when a tribute concert was announced to pay tribute to longtime Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022, the man made a point of being there.
At that star-studded concert, held at the Los Angeles Forum roughly five months after Hawkins’ shocking death at the age of 50, Black briefly took to the stage to share his memories of his friend, and to introduce one of Hawkins’ favourite bands, Rush.
“What an incredible show, what an incredible tribute to a beautiful man,” he said, “I was lucky. I got to see Taylor live in person several times, and he always blew doors down. Anyone who saw him live and in person knows what I’m talking about.”
Black then shared a personal memory of going backstage at the very same LA Forum in 2014, when the Foo Fighters were playing a set as part of Dave Grohl’s 45th birthday celebration, recalling, “I poked my head into Taylor’s dressing room, and he was just fucking practising as hard as hell. It was a beautiful thing to see, ’cause he was serious, no fucking around. He really meant it, and it was important to him. He didn’t want to do a good show. He wanted to fucking blow people’s minds. And he did it.”
The Foo Fighters, who followed a zig-zaggy path not unlike Jack’s since their emergence in the mid-1990s, were also similarly hard to stay mad at after a misstep, with Hawkins and his boyish enthusiasm and boundless energy a big reason why.
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