The Secret Plan of Jack Black

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Black measures much of his life with condiments. (Of the tepid reviews for his performance in 2005's King Kong, he says: "Maybe I didn't bring the spicy mustard. I only brought some mild cheddar sauce.") With the exception of a brief but startling performance as an acolyte of the politician in Bob Roberts, directed by Robbins, Black feels most of his early movie roles were expired mayo. "I did a lot of puppet acting, jobs where I did whatever the director said," Black says of unmemorable stints in such films as Waterworld and The Jackal. He hates confrontation, and he's not arrogant enough to have ever told a director he thought he was being misused, but he did find that movies were a lot less fun than theater or Tenacious D, the Spinal Tap-ish band he created with fellow Actors' Gang alum Kyle Gass. "It wasn't about control," says Black. "It was about the co-lla-bo. There's great directors who treat actors like cattle, but I hated it, and I knew if I ever had a choice, I didn't want to work with those guys. Who said that thing about actors and cattle? Hitchcock? Yeah, I don't want to work with that dude."

Luckily for Black, Tenacious D became a cult phenomenon on HBO, which led to his getting cast in High Fidelity ("The first time I had any real power in a film performance," he says, crediting director Stephen Frears). When The School of Rock followed and made him one of a handful of people who might actually be able to carry a movie, Black moved forward with his plan to make movies fun. Nacho Libre is the first production by Black and White's Black & White Films--"and it's kind of a model of what we want to do," says Black. The movie came about because Black and White loved Napoleon Dynamite, so they called director Hess to see if he wanted to hang out. "There are a lot of people with unique voices out there," says Black. "Mike is a pretty unique writer, and I've got my thing going on, so let's cut out all the lame guys and see if we can't party."

Hess, 26, didn't have an idea for a movie, but after some record shopping and pizza he mentioned a fascination with the life of a Mexican priest named Fray Tormenta. (Yes, Nacho Libre is based on a true story.) Black said, "Dude, I'm in." "We didn't have a script or anything," says Hess, "but he was confident we'd come up with something good." Hess, who co-wrote the film with his wife Jerusha and Mike White, had never worked with a celebrity before, and when it came time to shoot, "I kind of beat around the bush if I wanted to change something. But Jack was just like, 'Hess, dude, tell me what you want.'" Says White: "He's not a Jim Carrey. He's not looking to improvise, and he finds it annoying when people say, 'Then you'll come in and do your Jack Black thing!' He wants real direction, he just wants to be able to contribute too."