Jack Black Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Jack Black was thirty-eight when Margot at the Wedding opened. His commercial brand by then was loud comedy — High Fidelity (2000), Shallow Hal (2001), School of Rock (2003), Nacho Libre (2006), Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) — and Margot was the first time he had been cast in a small dramatic role where the part neither sang nor riffed nor mugged.
Tenacious D, Tim Robbins, and the long approach to dramatic work
Black came up through Tim Robbins's Actors' Gang in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, then through small parts in Robbins-directed pictures (Bob Roberts, 1992; Cradle Will Rock, 1999) and a stretch on Robbins's Dead Man Walking (1995) shoot. Tenacious D — the comedy-rock duo Black formed with Kyle Gass — gave him a parallel music career and a stage persona that High Fidelity and School of Rock leveraged into mainstream stardom. By 2007 he had been visible enough in comedy that Margot required the audience to perform an active reframe: this Jack Black is not joking. (wikipedia)
"I knew if I tried to be funny in this part, I'd kill the movie. So I just tried to be the guy." — Jack Black, A.V. Club (2007)
Malcolm as Jack Black with the comedy turned off
Malcolm is unemployed, defensive, a little entitled, prone to grandiose self-pity, casually inappropriate around his fiancée's teenage neighbor.b6 The role asks Black to play someone the audience is invited to dislike — and to play him with enough warmth that Pauline's loyalty is plausible. He mostly succeeds. The bedroom-confession scene, in which Malcolm walks back his denials about the kiss with a student in real time, is the performance's hardest moment, and Black plays it without indication or comic relief.b34
Manohla Dargis, reviewing the film in the Times, was among several critics who flagged the casting as a discovery:
"Mr. Black, who has been ramping up his dramatic chops in recent years, is a revelation here, mining unexpected pathos from a character who could easily have been a punch line." — Manohla Dargis, New York Times (2007)
Roger Ebert agreed:
"Jack Black is allowed to be sad, hurt and vulnerable in a way I have never seen from him before." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2007)
Why Baumbach cast him
Baumbach has said in interviews that he wanted an actor who would arrive on screen with built-in audience warmth that the film could then complicate. The casting of a comedy star in a dramatic part was a deliberate inversion of the indie-drama tradition (drama-trained actors slumming in comedies); here, Baumbach asked the comedian to do the slumming.
"I wanted someone the audience would be on the side of when he walked in. Then the movie could ask harder questions." — Noah Baumbach, paraphrased, The Guardian (2008)
After Margot
Black returned to the comedy track — Tropic Thunder (2008), Year One (2009), Gulliver's Travels (2010), The Polka King (2017) — but periodically revisited dramatic work, most notably in Richard Linklater's Bernie (2011), where he played a Texas funeral director who shoots an elderly widow. Linklater has said he cast Black on the strength of the Margot performance. (rogerebert)