"My plumbing is a little off today," Jack Black declares to me almost immediately the rst time I meet him, as though this is most surely information I will need to know. And then he lifts up his shirt and begins kneading his stomach with both hands, sending choppy swells and waves rippling over his belly. It's his new diet, he diagnoses, that has thrown his insides out of alignment. This is its second day. He told a nutritionist about his tendency to get ravenously hungry without warning "I have to eat in the next ten minutes. I don't have time to go to a restaurant. I go to the drivethrough. I can go weeks where I'm just going to the drivethrough every day." It struck him that this may not be the wisest routine. "You saw Super Size Me, right" he says. "That guy was onto something." So Black told this nutritionist that what he really needed was a satchel of food in his car at all times.
We have met for lunch this sunny day on the patio of the Los Angeles Four Seasons Hotel, a venue chosen by Black because he is staying here for a while. He and his girlfriend of many years, comedian and writer Laura Kightlinger, recently split up and the new house he has bought is not yet ready. He arrives at the table carrying a light brown bag. This, it transpires, contains all his food for the day and is delivered to the concierge each morning from a company called Sunfare that specializes in such diets.
Whatever its longterm benets, this regimen presents Black with an immediate problem. He doesn't want to break his diet by ordering off the Four Seasons menu, but he also thinks that it would be awkward or wrong to simply unpack his own food onto the table. This, I am beginning to learn, is very Jack Black a man who sees no embarrassment in the brazen and casual kneading of exposed stomach esh amid the prim and powerful lunchers of Beverly Hills but who would rather not be caught bringing food into the restaurant of a hotel where he is paying hundreds of dollars a night to sleep. Instead, he asks me if I will please have two courses and allow him to order one of them. So that's what happens I eat chicken as he watches over some undisturbed sashimi; then we swap plates and I move on to the sh. Meanwhile—but only whenever the waitress has gone indoors—Black sneaks a spoonful of cucumberanddill salad from the rectangular plastic tub hidden on his lap.
"Do you know what I gured out" he asks. "I was wondering why things are going so good for me now. Guess what It's the year of the cock." Jack Black was born in 1969, the year of the rooster on the Chinese calendar, as is 2005. "Here we are," he says. "It's not going to be good like this until I'm 48."
Three yearsofthecock ago, he came into the world as Thomas Black, though he was nicknamed Jack from the beginning. His parents, Thomas and Judith, were satellite engineers at TRW, though he's not sure whether they came together through work or through their shared hobby. "They were both avid folk dancers," he notes, "so they may have met folk dancing." As for their work on communications satellites, he says, "I never really knew what the hell they were doing. I always imagined there's a lot of mathematical equations on chalkboards and stuff." When I ask whether they were really working on spy satellites, he offers that they probably did. "But they had a very volatile relationship, and they would sometimes ght at the office," he remembers. "And one time they had a big ght in the parking lot, and they both lost their government clearances to work on secret projects. If there's any instability, I guess that's all it takes."
His mother, who is eight years older than his father and would later work on the Hubble telescope, already had three children; Jack is their only child together. Their jobs were lucrative enough for him to grow up in a sevenbedroom house in Hermosa Beach, California, where his bedroom had blackandwhite monster wallpaper Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Phantom of the Opera. He had asked for it, but it still scared him sometimes.
Black remembers various indications of the man he would become. When he listened to his favorite Dr. Seuss album, he would imagine himself onstage making all the noises, an audience marveling at the way he could make one sound come out of his nostril, another out of his armpit, and so on. "People were just blown away by Wonderboy," he says, recalling how it was in his head. He thinks his desire to be noticed was hardwired. "They'll probably be able to nd it in the DNA someday 'Oh! This is the needforattention gene!' " Another time, his grandfather tried to teach him chess while his parents were folk dancing. Black didn't really understand the game, but he did know how to make faces as though he really knew what was going on and was pondering deeply over every nudged pawn. "People were impressed—'Look how he's thinking! Wow. Maybe he's a genius or something,' " he says. "And that was very satisfying to me, that feeling of being special."
"I just quit smoking today," he explains on that rst day we meet, "so I may at some point get irrationally angry with you." He has quit before. The longest he has managed to stay smokefree as an adult was a year, eventually faltering in New Zealand. "I had a bit of a lost weekend while we were doing King Kong," he says. "Look, overall I'm very responsible on set. I'm not one of those dudes who come drunk to the set. But there was a lost weekend where I had a little extra time off and I did some ecstasy and I went on a kind of crazy rampage and I started smoking. Me and another member of the cast, who will remain nameless, just running around, dancing around, drinking and ecstasizing, smoking like a chimney. And then it was over. I was fully back."
In King Kong, he will appear as the lmmaker Carl Denham, journeying to a mysterious island, unaware of the giant ape that dwells there. "There's so much riding on it," he says, and chuckles at this. "It's unfathomable what would happen if it was a big oparoo." It is the rst role he has ever accepted without reading the script, and though he has previously been in lms that were not comedies, this is almost certainly the least comedic character he has ever played. "I got to do some stuff I haven't done before," he says. "The movie is ominous and creepy and sometimes beautiful, and it's a cool change of pace for me."
He says he was very aware of the precedent set by the last group of actors to enter Peter Jackson's kingdom, the Lord of the Rings cohort. "There was a lot of pressure in my mind to bond," he says, "because I had read so much about all the hobbits and Viggo doing all kinds of extreme things together. It just sounded like they were all having the times of their lives and"—he slips into the kind of semisatirical, melodramatic voice he employs as onehalf of his music duo, Tenacious D—"making friendships that would last a lifetime and giving each other power hugs that meant the world to each other… I was like, What if we don't"
In a way, they didn't. They got on and shared adventures away from the set, but they were there for seven or eight months, not the better part of two years. Black also thinks the darkness of the movie played its part. "It wasn't a lovefest with all the actors in this movie, because the movie had some real fucking dark things to it. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be that kind of summercamp vibe."
Black beckons me into the passenger seat of his SUV, then points out how unwise I am to be there. "You're sitting in my bag's place," he says. "I'm getting really mad at you." We pass a sign advertising baby back ribs that he complains is "fucking with my brain…because I love ribs, and I guarantee there's no ribs in my satchel of health."
He is due in the studio later this afternoon to record songs for the movie Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, but he has places he'd like to go rst—to the comic store for the latest issue of Daniel Clowes's Eightball and to a record shop. He has been trying to make a mix CD, but the songs he's downloaded from Apple's music store won't burn, so he needs to buy the songs again on CD. "I'm really pissed off," he explains, "because I just started going out with this girl—I obsessively compulse over things, and she's the center of my obsessivecompulsive energy vortex of pain right now. I can't stop thinking about her, and I wanted to burn her a CD of songs to win her heart." His chosen heartwinners include Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Neil Young, Nick Drake, and PJ Harvey. "It's fucking making me so mad. The technology is fucking me. All I know is that I'm not going to fucking win the heart of the fair maiden because of fucking iTunes…"
Tenacious D are recording at the Hollywood Hills home studio of John King, one of the Dust Brothers. Both King and Kyle Gass, Black's partner in Tenacious D, have also started on the Sunfare fooddelivery system, and so while they will soon move on to pressing issues of competing guitar riffs, clicktrack speeds, and the funniness of specic couplets, the early moments of today's recording session are taken up with a keen debate over the varying merits of Atkins and the Zone.
There are probably plenty of Jack Black fans for whom Tenacious D, with their partcomic, partoversincere, ridiculous heavymetal tropes, remains a baffling side project. But it is crystal clear to Black that Tenacious D has been the catalyst for many of the good things that have happened to him. It was only through their live shows and their 1999 series on HBO that he got to unleash himself. "That's my voice," he explains. "That's the energy I wanted to bring to other roles in the future." And it led directly to the offer of the role as an obnoxious recordstore worker in High Fidelity, the part that kickstarted his recent ascent.
Tenacious D have hovered in the background ever since, playing concerts, releasing an album and a compilation DVD, but in their master plan they have always been stuttering toward a Tenacious D lm. To Black, it seems as though making this movie is important not only as the culmination of the Tenacious D adventure but also as the fulllment of a bargain with himself to stay true to what has brought him here. This, in its typically twisted way, is also very Jack Black that within his universe, the way for him to keep it real is to honor his commitment to the ctional Tenacious D—"two slightly overweight, slightly toooldtoberocker guys that think they are the greatest band on earth." Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny will tell the story of how the duo met, got their name, and set off on their quest to be the greatest band on earth. Satan, Meat Loaf, and Ronnie James Dio are all somehow involved. "Even if it sucks," he says, "it will be my stinky sucky poo."
Right now they have a couple more weeks to nish writing the songs that will be heard in the lm. Once dietary discussions have been suspended and they have been joined by the movie's director, Liam Lynch, they turn to a song to be called "Master Exploder." Gass says to Black, "I don't know if it was authorized, but we went into the riffernator yesterday," and plays back an angular System of a Down–esque guitar riff that he and a guitarist called Shreddy have been working on.
Gass has been laboring away on his guitar idea for maybe an hour when Black steps in and runs through some very different, Whostyle riffing on his acoustic guitar that he, King, and Lynch all seem to concur is preferable to Gass's. Black plays it a few times in the sound booth, and King starts editing together small phrases from various takes. A while later, they notice that Gass is no longer there, and there is some speculation about whether he may have left because his riff has been superseded. Black says that he's probably just gone for food or smokes or something.
Gass returns an hour or so later. It's not immediately clear whether he is annoyed, though when King mentions that he now drinks coffee when he is hungry to stave off the pangs, Gass's response is perhaps slightly suggestive.
"You could suck Jack's dick and taste his cum," Gass proposes.
"I would not like that taste," deects King.
No matter. Gass has a further notion. "Maybe you could crawl up his butt and taste his shit," he says, and moves toward the door. "Works for Liam."
Jack Black's parents are both Jewish—his mother by birth, his father by conversion—and until he was 13 he had to go to Hebrew school three times a week, something he considered a "sucky thing" because it was like extra school and he hated school. After his Bar Mitzvah, he was considered a man and allowed to make his own decisions on such matters; he decided to leave the synagogue behind. It was also around the age of 13 that Black started hanging out with the heavymetal kids in Culver City, the ones into Sabbath who hung out by the park. He started smoking—cigarettes, then pot—and drinking beer and skateboarding and wearing a annel shirt and his baseball cap backward. When a police car came down the street, they would all run; the police weren't after them, but it was fun to pretend that they were.
His teenage waywardness was curbed when a friend stole Black's mother's credit card to get them cocaine money and also, unbeknownst to Black, to go on a shopping spree. Black was sent to Poseidon, a school for troubled youngsters with only about thirty students, where he rediscovered his interest in acting.
He had already acted a little bit when he was 13, with some success. He was cast in a commercial for the video game Pitfall. Black had told God that if he could be on TV and be seen by his friends, he would require nothing further in his life. But when God came through, Black decided he wanted more and reneged on the deal. Another ad followed, for Smurfberry Crunch, and a part in the TV series The Fall Guy, with Lee Majors. He was also cast in a play called Inside Eddie Binstock being directed by a young actor named Tim Robbins. But three weeks into the sixweek run, Black quit. "I was sick of it," he remembers. "It was too hard… It was getting in the way of my videogame time."
At Poseidon, and at Crossroads, the artsfriendly school he later moved on to, his passion was rekindled. He got into UCLA to study theater, eventually dropping out because he had become obsessed with the Los Angeles–based troupe the Actors' Gang, which was cofounded by Tim Robbins. He pestered them until they let him become involved, though for some time he steered clear of their leader, in case he held Black's earlier desertion against him.
When Robbins began work on his rst movie as a director, the political satire Bob Roberts, Black auditioned and was cast as one of Roberts's young, fevered acolytes. In the director's commentary on the DVD, Robbins praises Black's opening moments on the screen "Jack, the guy in the middle…really has a fervor in his eyes that I nd so compelling and frightening. It's kind of this strange, sexual Nazi kind of weirdness…the psychopathic eyes of the truly devoted."
A good description. "I was just sort of playing myself," Black points out. "The reality of the situation was I was dying to have that part. I was dying for Tim Robbins to fucking accept me into his world and make me a mini–Tim Robbins. And the part was just me dying to be accepted into Bob Roberts's world and be a mini–Bob Roberts, so…"
His performance was fairly brief but memorable, and perhaps he could be excused for thinking that he was a movie star. He even went to the movie's premiere, at the Cannes Film Festival—he wasn't invited, exactly, but his father now lived in Cannes, so he gured it made sense—and while he was there he got to go to a party hosted by Robert Altman in the hills above town. "Just a showbiz creamdream delu," he says. "I smoked a joint with Altman and some other fucking dudes. It doesn't get much more stony glamorous. I remember thinking, This is the beginning. And then…nothing."
He would do plenty of acting in the '90s without a single part as good as the one in Bob Roberts. At least in Robbins's second movie as a director, Dead Man Walking, in which Black was Sean Penn's brother, he had the satisfaction of loving the movie and got a chance to study the movie's star closeup. "Sean Penn was a fucking freak," he says. "He was just very reckless. And intimidating. I was a little scared of him. You just didn't know what he was going to do next. He would burst into spontaneous psychobabble poetry and the whole room would go silent and uncomfortable, and no one would know what to say next 'cause there was a lunatic raving poetry. Not a fun hang. It was literally, 'Holy crap, this guy's off the deep end.' But then when he was oncamera, it was like, 'Holy crap. This guy is on another planet—he's on planet Fucking Great Super Acting.' "
Things became easier after High Fidelity, though there were stumbles. He describes Saving Silverman, not unreasonably, as "a little turd." "I just got impatient, didn't want to wait around for someone else to give me a great part," he recalls. On paper, Shallow Hal seemed just the kind of opportunity one would wait around for. "The Farrelly brothers, Gwyneth Paltrow," he summarizes, "you've got to give it a shot." But it was a hollow, dishonest mess, and Black felt like a puppet whose input wasn't required or desired. Orange County was also a mess, but a more likable one. It was written by Black's neighbor at the time, Mike White, who, ironically, was set to play the part of the stoner brother who sits around the house in his underwear, until the producers offered it to Black.
It was the friendship between Black and White that led to School of Rock. "The reason I wrote School of Rock," White says, "was I really liked him personally, and I really believed in him as an actor, but all the scripts that were being sent to him were very much like the fratty guy who gets drunk and falls down. I think originally they were trying to put him in a John Belushi or even Chris Farley kind of littlebittubby, very sophomoric comedy thing… And in my opinion, there's such a bigger charm to him." School of Rock allowed that charm to come through; perhaps for the rst time on lm, his annoyingly hyperactive dorky mallmetal persona was tempered with the calm enthusiasm, unshowy intelligence, and guarded glimmers of kindness he betrays in the esh. Black had entertained people before and become a big movie star, but it was only in the wake of School of Rock that he rst seemed beloved.
His greatest fear going into the movie was of all the children. Black started to perform when he was that age, and whenever he is surrounded by children he ashes back to being a kid and to what he would think then Fuck, what if they don't nd me entertaining… They're not going to like me… He worries that the children will see through him, spot him as the fake he sometimes fears he is.
"I don't know," Black tells me, trying to explain this. "Sometimes I don't feel like I'm human. Like I'm a robot. Like I don't really have feelings or something. Sometimes I feel that." He elaborates a little further "Maybe I'm afraid to feel feelings. As an actor, you have to go through all the range of emotions. And certain emotions I can tap into real easy—joy, anger, fear. But sadness is the one that I shut down. There's a mental block that doesn't allow me to get sad."
In a 2004 readers' poll in Jane magazine, Jack Black was the writein winner in the "boy you are strangely attracted to" category. It's not hard to see why he has that appeal, though I wonder whether the kind of teenage girl who voted for him might have a somewhat incomplete knowledge of his canon and full conversational compass. Perhaps some voters might have been deterred, for instance, by Liam Lynch's three guilefully gross Tenacious D shorts. In the rst, Black gives Gass a blow job for money in a parking lot before they recognize each other. In the second, they collect their semen in a large vase and sell it on the street as a health tonic. In the third, Kyle gives birth to Black's baby from his butt. Or by Black's truly remarkable dancenumber cameo in the 2002 movie Run Ronnie Run, where, performing what is clearly intended as a fake outtake from Mary Poppins, he shimmies impressively while singing in a bad Cockney accent a song of domestic advice whose refrain is Give her a kick in the cunt. Or, indeed, by freeform reallife dialogue such as the following, sparked by Black's mention of the bowelloosening qualities of the fruit he has been eating as part of this new diet.
BLACK You can't overestimate the importance of a good bowel movement. It's one of the big ones.
ME Most people don't like to see any pleasure in it.
BLACK Those people are like some fucking puritanical religious fucks. Nothing feels quite as great as an awesome movement. I mean, it's right up there with a great orgasm.
ME I don't think many women would agree with that.
BLACK I think maybe it's a guy thing. Maybe the women don't care about taking shits as much. I don't know whether this is true, but I remember hearing something about how… [he suddenly stops] I don't want to talk about this anymore. I don't like where we're going.
ME I don't think I brought it up.
BLACK [deciding to continue] Well, you know, some women like anal sex. Is that true I've never met one. But supposedly some women love having anal sex. And I want to know, do they love it because the guy's loving it and they love him loving it, or do they love it because they like the feeling of a penis in their asshole
ME Well, lots of guys like it, too.
BLACK Yeah. But maybe there are more pleasure sensors in a guy's asshole. Because it's very close to the prostate. Whereas the woman, there's no prostate, there's no reason why the anal penetration would translate to sexual pleasure…
ME But when you're feeling sexy, there's many parts of your body that start transmitting pleasure…
BLACK [nods] So, like, I suppose the ultimate in pleasure would be eating a delicious sandwich while shitting and having sex.
Jack Black leans over and tries a little of my grasshopper quiche—"a little like eggplant," he judges—and cuts me a corner of his pork chop. It is now October, and we are in Oaxaca, Mexico. Somewhat disconcertingly, the real Black now has a real mustache. He has also just come from wrestling practice. Both of these are related to the role he starts lming in two days, as a novitiate priest who moonlights as a luchador, a Mexican wrestler, to help the orphans. The movie, Nacho Libre, is being directed by Napoleon Dynamite auteur Jared Hess and has been written by Hess, his wife, Jerusha, and Mike White. Black and White have now formed a production company—called, naturally, Black & White—and this is its rst movie.
Black is also carrying a slight shoulder injury from the Tenacious D movie shoot. "I was punching Kyle when he was in a big tenfoot penis outt," he explains. Both Black and Gass acknowledge the brief spat I witnessed at the recording studio and offer their own explanations. "Oh shit, I was just kind of hurt at the time that I wasn't sort of getting a fair shake on my thing," Gass tells me. "There's always a power struggle in any relationship," Black reects. "And with comedy duos, there's always going to be some friction."
After lunch we sit by the hotel pool in the courtyard of a converted sixteenthcentury Mexican convent while Black covers himself in SPF 30 suntan lotion, pushing up each leg of his blue swimming trunks so he can massage it in right up to his groin. He covers himself in layer after layer. "I have a little OCD," he apologizes. "If I do something, I feel like it has to be done all the way… I like a nice round number. I like clean lines. Things that are closed and done. I like to knock on a door three times. If someone knocks on a door four times, I don't like it. I like three or ve. I have weird things about concerts. If we perform, I can't invite anyone. I can't call, because in my mind I'm saying, 'It's going to be good enough that you should come down and see me because I'm going to be good tonight,' and that's a jinr. So I don't invite anyone, and people consequently get mad at me."
After a while, he announces that his eyes are burning from the suntan lotion and he needs to swim. He walks in the shallow end and sinks under the water. He moves gracefully, swimming half the length of the pool until he is underneath his girlfriend, Tanya. In one motion, he rises for air and lifts her out of the water. Tanya is the woman he was making the mix CD for back in April. She plays cello in indierock bands and is one of the three daughters of the famous jazz bassist Charlie Haden.
She was at the Crossroads School with Black. "I had a crush on her," he tells me. "We weren't, like, close buddies. She was too pretty, and I was scared to talk to her." They bumped into each other last April, at Frank Black's fortiethbirthday party, where Tenacious D had been asked to perform. "And Tanya was there, and as usual, it was like it always was. I got really nervous, and I talked to her…and it's been great. I'm really crazy about her."
That evening there is a preshoot party for the Nacho Libre cast and crew on the grounds of the Hotel Victoria, on a hilltop overlooking the city. A band plays Santana songs, then moretraditional Mexican dancing music, and the rst two people on the dance oor are Black and Tanya, not whooping it up but slowly moving together, facetoface, Black stepping up to his responsibility as the lm's center by being out there, but still, nonetheless, stealing a private moment in its midst.
When Black was 10, his parents split up. Messily. Both his parents had erce tempers, but it was his mother's that most scared him. "When they fought, she would get so mad. One time she punched a hole through the bedroom door. I'd be terried and run away down the hall. We had a livein housekeeper I would run to. She had a son born at the same time as me, Juan, and I'd go and hide with them."
Before his parents' relationship nally burst apart, it went through other stages. These were the '70s.
BLACK We were going to this thing called Family Synergy, where you would go into this camp. Everybody nude. Groovy. Synergizing with all these families, so that we'd be all, like, one big cult family. I don't know what the hell it was.
ME And you'd all run around naked
BLACK Yeah. And my parents met this other woman who ended up coming and living with us.
ME In a threeofthemtogether kind of way
BLACK Yeah. In the same bed. They were trying to make it work. Whatever. It was a meltdown.
The other woman left before they nally split. His father moved a mile away, living with a new girlfriend. "I remember my mom was so fucking jealous and mad that she came over and starting beating her up, the new girlfriend," Black says.
As he relates all this history, it seems, in parts, so extraordinary and unexpected and he describes it so matteroffactly that when Black explains that the next fault line was caused by him having the hots for his father's girlfriend, I wonder aloud whether he might be making any of this up.
"No, no, no," he assures me. He pauses and perhaps considers how all this may sound. "Yeah, they're going to be bummed when they read this stuff. I'm not going to tell them. But, whatever. It happened. It's not a big deal. They're all past it now. They're both remarried."
He says that he never explicitly declared his feelings for his father's girlfriend, though he did pilfer some naked pictures his father had taken. "But she ended up leaving. I think, partly," he suggests, "because she knew that I was crazy for her and was not into the weird unhealthiness of it." He reconsiders. "She never said anything, and my dad never said anything. You know, I just projected that, probably."
Still, he agrees that some key parts of the way he is now were probably d in place over those years. He tells me that when he was young he used to sometimes wonder "I probably shouldn't say this…" whether he was the Messiah. The Chosen One. It was that feeling that he was special.
"I had that," he says, "but I also had the opposite, the insecure feeling, like maybe I wasn't as good as everybody else, maybe I wasn't as smart, because I daydreamed a lot, maybe I couldn't focus my attention very well… I think it's especially common with people who grew up with parents that divorced and didn't love each other. Because if you're growing up and then you have two sides of yourself, your mother's and your father's, that don't like each other and break up, then there's two sides of yourself that don't like yourself. This side of yourself doesn't like that side of yourself, and there's a constant disharmony that comes from that. And so you've got this one part of you that says, 'Yeah, I'm fucking special, I could be the most special thing ever,' and then another part of you that says, 'Yeah, you're especially fucking shit—I don't like me, nobody else does, either; you're the worst of everybody.' Either way you're special, though, I guess—the worst or the best."
Black says that he is most like his mother in his temper and in the way he doesn't like to see injuries. "Even if it's, like, on skateboard videos at the end. It hurts me in my testicles. They ascend. Even in comedies—the hook in the mouth that Ben got in There's Something About Mary, I hate that. It's not funny." He says that he has his father's daydreaminess "My dad likes to take a good hike; so do I. He likes pork chops and corn. And so do I. He likes the universe and the cosmos and thinking about innity. So do I. And he doesn't believe in an afterlife. And neither do I. At least I don't think he does—maybe he's changed his mind."
Black often used to say in interviews that he would never have children—he worried about feeling trapped and anchored to home and having his selsh time eaten away—but when I mention this, he says he has changed his mind. "I don't want to go anywhere anyway," he says. "I like to be at home. And I like love."
Mike White tells me that Black's reaction to all this success is simply to be pleased "And because of that, it's more of a gravy situation than a starving hunger to conquer more worlds. Sometimes I feel he'll, like, do a couple more movies and just call it a day. I do think there's a part of him that's, if it's not fun anymore, if he's feeling like it's not cool anymore or whatever, I just don't think he's going to force anything." His friend and School of Rock costar Sarah Silverman says, "He's this combination of dude and genius, you know. A lot of comics and performers, everything they do is trying to prove that they're smart, and that's just not part of his agenda." Black says he wants to die on the eve of his seventieth birthday because he has never seen anyone in their seventies enjoying themselves. He enjoys Scrabble on the Internet, has loved video games since the days of Space Invaders, and likes to play a single game until he has conquered it completely. "I feel like life is kind of boring and needs to be lled with entertaining things," he says. "I like to entertain and be entertained."
His favored numbers are 3, 5, 13, and 23, and on the rare occasions he plays roulette, he always bets on black. He was relieved that there was no requirement in New Zealand for the cast to get matching King Kong tattoos, as he has never been tattooed and thinks that a tattoo is one more thing that would make him feel trapped. Though he has decided that if he were to brand himself permanently, he would be prepared to consider one thing THIS TOO SHALL PASS.
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.
