Comedy icon Jack Black has an extensive filmography with some absolute classics — and some very big misses, including Shallow Hal.
From School of Rock to Kung Fu Panda, the 54-year-old actor has over 190 credits to his name with numerous award wins and nominations.
Despite his prolific career, not everything goes quite to plan as Jack has recently put the breaks on one of his biggest projects, Tenacious D.
The decision was made after bandmate Kyle Gass, 64, made a birthday wish while on tour with Jack in Sydney in which he said: ‘Don’t miss Trump next time.’
Fans of Tenacious D have slammed The Holiday star for being ‘spineless’ and ‘turning his back’ on Kyle after being vocally anti-Trump in the past.
Another fumbled project was 2001’s Shallow Hal, which has been widely criticised for fatphobia and Jack himself called it a ‘sell-out’ role which he was not proud of.
‘I had an opportunity to work with some dudes I thought were really funny, but it didn’t turn out as I’d hoped,’ Jack said in 2006.
‘I wasn’t proud of it, and I got paid a lot of money, so, in retrospect, it feels like a sell-out.’
The Farrelly Brothers wrote and directed the comedy, having had success with Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary.
In Shallow Hal, the Bowser star plays a man named Hal who is hypnotised to see only inner beauty, with the joke being he falls for a fat woman (because he perceives her as thin).
At the time, this had a suggestion of progress and was one of the few positive portrayals of a plus-sized person — let alone a desirable plus-sized woman.
Gwyneth Paltrow, 51, who played Hal’s love interest Rosemary, wore a fat suit for filming which has sparked controversy in more recent years.
She also branded the film ‘sh**e’, five years after its straight-to-DVD launch and later joked it was just a ‘disaster’.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2006, the Iron Man star said: ‘The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand, and I walked through the lobby. It was so sad.
‘It was so disturbing. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese. I felt humiliated.
‘For some reason, the clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible. I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive.’
Last year, Gwyneth’s body double Ivy Snitzer spoke out for the first time on the impact the movie had on her.
Ivy, 43, was used to fill in close-ups of Rosemary’s arms, torso, and thighs when the fat suit couldn’t bridge that gap.
‘It was like the worst parts about being fat were magnified,’ she told The Guardian. ‘And no one was telling me I was funny.’
She was offered roles which portrayed sad fat women preying on younger men, which Ivy turned down as she ‘just want to make people laugh; I don’t want to make people sad.’
While the film may have had the right idea with its moral message, the pre-body-positivity landscape of the 00s couldn’t quite stick the landing.
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