Jack Black’s Wild Ride: 10 Things You Never Knew About the Comedy King

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Funnyman Jack Black stars as Steve in “A Minecraft Movie,” a new film based on the blockbuster video game, but here are 10 things you may not know about the 55-year-old actor.

1. Born Thomas Jacob Black in Santa Monica, Calif., the actor isn’t a rocket scientist, but his parents were! Mom Judith Love Cohen was an aerospace engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and helped with the Apollo 13 mission, while his father, Thomas William Black, was also an aerospace engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

2. At age 13, Jack had his first TV credit, appearing in a commercial for the Atari video game Pitfall — a foreshadow of his 2017 adventure-comedy Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

3. By age 14, Jack was addicted to cocaine because he was “hanging out with some pretty rough characters. I was scared to go to school — one of them wanted to kill me.”

4. Black and Kyle Gass form the rock band Tenacious D. He bribed Kyle to teach him how to play the guitar with free food from Jack in the Box.

5. In his iconic film School of Rock, Jack insisted on doing the stage dive scene himself — the “fans” who caught him were all stuntmen to ensure he would not be dropped.

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6. He and The White Lotus creator Mike White formed a production company called Black and White.

7. Jack met his wife, cellist Tanya Haden, the daughter of jazz great Charlie Haden, at Crossroads, a private school — they met again 15 years after graduation at a friend’s birthday party. They have two sons.

8. Think you spotted Black at Disneyland? Yeah, it was probably him! He loves the theme park and spent his 50th birthday with his family there while attempting to complete the 50 Challenge — to ride 50 rides in a few days.

9. Black frets over making talk show appearances, explaining, “You don’t have to be smart, but you have to have something. There’s a lot of pressure. I start trying to think something up to say about a month in advance.”

10. Jack is a member of the so-called “Frat Pack,” a group of comic actors who all hit it big in the early 2000s — members include Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.