Jack Black, the Tenacious D screamer who has voiced Bowser in two billion-dollar films

Jack Black

Photo: NickRewind / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 28, 1969 Santa Monica, California, USA
Occupation	Actor, comedian and musician
Known for	Ice Age, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Kung Fu Panda
Awards	Grammy · Emmy · Hollywood Walk of Fame star · 2 Kids' Choice

In April 2026, Jack Black did two things in the same week that almost nobody else in Hollywood could have done together. On April 3, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened with him once again voicing Bowser, the fire-breathing king of the Koopas, and went on to become the first film of the year to pass one billion dollars worldwide. The next night he walked onto the stage of Saturday Night Live as host for the fifth time, which put him in the show’s small five-timers club. The film and the show have different audiences, but Black got there the same way: by shouting, singing and committing completely to the bit.

At 57, Black is one of the more unusual stars of his generation. He did not break through as a leading man with a conventional face or a dramatic résumé. He broke through as the loud guy in the record shop, and he has spent the quarter century since proving that the loud guy could carry a family blockbuster, anchor a comedy rock band and win a Grammy, all without toning himself down.

The son of two engineers

Thomas Jacob Black was born on August 28, 1969, in Santa Monica, California. Both of his parents were engineers who worked on satellites. His mother, Judith Love Cohen, was an aerospace engineer whose career touched the Hubble Space Telescope and the guidance systems of the Apollo era, and his father, Thomas William Black, worked in the same field. His parents divorced when he was a boy.

He studied at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where drama became the one subject he took seriously, and then enrolled at UCLA. He dropped out in his second year. By then he had already joined The Actors’ Gang, the Los Angeles theater company run by Tim Robbins, which he entered in 1987. That connection gave him his first screen role, in Robbins’s political satire Bob Roberts in 1992.

Tenacious D and the long road to a breakout

The 1990s were a decade of small parts. Black turned up in Dead Man Walking, The Cable Guy, Mars Attacks! and Enemy of the State, and in sketches on HBO’s Mr. Show with Bob and David. The more important thing he did in those years happened offscreen. In 1994 he formed Tenacious D with Kyle Gass, a fellow member of The Actors’ Gang. The joke was simple and durable: two men who sing about their own greatness with total conviction, backed by acoustic guitars and genuinely good harmonies.

HBO gave the duo a short series between 1997 and 2000, and in 2001 they released their first album, Tenacious D. Three more studio records followed: The Pick of Destiny in 2006, Rize of the Fenix in 2012 and Post-Apocalypto in 2018. The 2006 feature film Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny struggled at the box office but became a cult favorite. The band’s most surprising honor came at the 57th Grammy Awards, where their cover of Dio’s “The Last in Line” won Best Metal Performance.

The partnership hit its hardest moment in July 2024. During a concert in Sydney, Gass made an onstage remark that Black said had blindsided him, and the rest of the tour was cancelled. Black has kept making music in other settings since then. In September 2026 Tom Morello announced that Black would front a band called Jack Sabbath at his Power to the People festival on October 3 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, backed by a group of teenage musicians that includes Morello’s son Roman and Scott Ian’s son Revel.

High Fidelity and School of Rock

The film career turned in 2000 with High Fidelity, Stephen Frears’s adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel. Black played Barry, the aggressively opinionated clerk in John Cusack’s record shop, and stole scenes with a performance that felt like it had been unleashed rather than directed. He has said himself that he considers the role his breakout. Shallow Hal and Orange County followed, and then came the part that defined him.

School of Rock, directed by Richard Linklater in 2003 from a script by Mike White, cast Black as Dewey Finn, a failed rocker who fakes his way into a substitute teaching job at a private school and turns his class into a band. The film was built around his energy, and it earned him his first Golden Globe nomination. It also set the template for much of what came next: a grown man who never stopped being a kid, played with enough sincerity that audiences took him seriously.

The rest of the decade tested that template in different directions. He played the ambitious filmmaker Carl Denham in Peter Jackson‘s King Kong in 2005, a luchador-loving friar in Jared Hess’s Nacho Libre and a film composer opposite Kate Winslet in Nancy Meyers’s The Holiday, both in 2006, and a drug-addled comedy star in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder in 2008.

Po, Bernie and the franchise years

In 2008 Black gave his voice to Po, the clumsy, noodle-loving panda of DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda. The role became one of the most durable of his career, spanning four films through Kung Fu Panda 4 in 2024 and a Netflix series, Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, which brought him a Children’s and Family Emmy for voice performance in 2023.

His best dramatic work came from a return to Linklater. In Bernie, released in 2011, he played Bernie Tiede, the well-liked funeral director of a small Texas town who killed the wealthy widow he had befriended, played by Shirley MacLaine. The performance was quiet, strange and precise, and it brought him a second Golden Globe nomination.

The 2010s moved him toward family franchises. He played the author R. L. Stine in Goosebumps in 2015, then joined Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle in 2017 as a video game avatar inhabited by a self-absorbed teenage girl, a gag he sold completely. Jumanji: The Next Level followed in 2019, and in 2018 he starred in Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls. That same year, on September 18, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in December he launched the YouTube channel JablinskiGames, where he posts gaming videos and silly clips, often with his sons.

Bowser, Steve and a billion-dollar run

The last few years have made Black one of the most bankable voices in the business. In The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023 he voiced Bowser and sang “Peaches”, a power ballad about the villain’s love for Princess Peach. The song became his first solo entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 56, and earned him a third Golden Globe nomination, for best original song. At the Kids’ Choice Awards, the role won him Favorite Villain in 2024.

Not everything worked. Borderlands, the 2024 video game adaptation in which he voiced the robot Claptrap, was a flop. But in 2025 A Minecraft Movie, directed by Jared Hess, cast him in live action as Steve, the game’s default hero, opposite Jason Momoa. The film grossed more than 950 million dollars worldwide, audiences turned lines like “chicken jockey” into a noisy theater ritual, and Black won Favorite Movie Actor at the 2025 Kids’ Choice Awards.

At Christmas 2025 he reunited with Paul Rudd for Anaconda, Tom Gormican’s meta-comedy about two old friends trying to remake the 1997 creature feature. It crossed 100 million dollars worldwide early in 2026.

Then came The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in April 2026, which brought Bowser back and crossed one billion dollars by June. That makes two Mario films past the billion-dollar mark, both with Black’s Bowser at the center of the fun.

What comes next

The schedule ahead is full. Jumanji: Open World, directed again by Jake Kasdan and billed as the final chapter of the series, is set for December 25, 2026, with Black returning as Professor Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon alongside Johnson, Hart and Gillan. Filming on A Minecraft Movie Squared began in New Zealand at the end of April 2026, with Hess directing again and Kirsten Dunst joining the cast; the sequel is dated for July 23, 2027.

Away from the sets, Black has been married since March 2006 to the cellist and singer Tanya Haden, daughter of the jazz bassist Charlie Haden. They wed in Big Sur, California, and have two sons, born in 2006 and 2008. He has described himself as an atheist who still identifies as nominally Jewish, and he and Haden have raised their boys in the Jewish faith.

What connects all of it, from the record shop to the Koopa castle, is a performer who never learned to hold back. The voice that screamed its way through Tenacious D’s early club shows is the same one that now carries two of the biggest animated franchises in the world. Jack Black did not have to change to get here. The industry eventually came around to him.