Jack Black recalled how a school therapist was able to help him overcome his drug problem as a teenager.
During a recent appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, Black shared his experiences with psychedelic drugs and cocaine as a teenager, and revealed he began “dabbling with the devil’s dandruff” when he was in middle school.
“Once I got my bar mitzvah at 13 years old and became a man I was now ready to experiment with [drugs],” he told Shepard. “And also I was just getting into heavy metal music, and I don’t want to blame heavy metal music for my dark path, but it was definitely the rite of passage in a Beavis and Butthead way.”
He explained that as a child he felt “this is what it means to be a man,” saying it was important “to go to the dark side to prove you can survive it,” adding “the more dangerous” an activity was “the more attractive” it became to him.
The “Kung Fu Panda” star shared that he first tried acid as a young teenager when an older friend, who he looked up to, offered it to him. He moved from Hermosa, where he never felt like he fit in, to Culver City, where he was introduced to bands like Black Sabbath, and felt he had found his group.
“I did look up to him like a big brother figure, or I had a thing where I wanted a father figure, even though I had a great dad, but I wanted the dark dad. I wanted the one that was going to show me the ways of the dark side. And this guy filled in that role,” he said. “And we did acid, and I remember that night laughing as hard as I’d ever laughed and having this strange feeling of being whole for the first time and suddenly this big dark mysterious universe that I didn’t know how I fit into all felt right.”
He recalled “having kind of a weird spiritual experience” while on the psychedelic drugs, saying it was all great until “it stopped being fun.” When speaking to Shepard, he described “the darkest day or night in [his] life” when the effects of the drug would not wear off and “it wouldn’t stop.”
“It was so bad that I was locked in this insane brain prison where all I could see was chess pieces going off into infinity playing a game with myself,” he explained. “And I had this terror that I was never going to break free of it, and it was like as good as that first hour and a half was, it wasn’t worth it. And thank God I made it through the night. I don’t think I slept a minute.”
Black’s experimentation with psychedelics led to him try cocaine for the first time, with the actor saying he “was down to clown with anything [his] big bro crew of heavy metal maniacs” were dabbling with.
He recalled feeling a “rush,” similar to when he first took acid, explaining it feels like a “doorway [being] opened in your brain” which makes you feel as if you “have a lot of brilliant things to say really fast and you go for hours and hours.” Looking back, Black is happy there were no cameras around when he was getting high, because he finds it “in retrospect, so embarrassing.”
“It gives you a brief energy that lets you delve deeper than you normally would with other people,” he said. “Maybe that’s why Freud supposedly used it a lot in sessions, so that they could go deeper than they usually would about themselves and about the nooks and crannies of their personality.”
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Due to his drug use, as well as a falling out with a member of his friend group over a girl that led to Black getting beat up occasionally, his parents decided to transfer him to a school for at-risk kids.
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It was here that Black found his love of theater and began to find different outlets to deal with his struggles.
“There was a theater teacher named Deb Devine who I latched onto and she taught us all improvisation games… and got us all thinking about telling stories and it was kind of theater therapy,” he said. “You could work out some of your demons by playing roles and just come off the top of your head with s— you’re going to say to the other person in the scene. It was kind of amazing.”
He later found himself in the office of the school’s therapist, and although he did not expect it, he told Shepard “it only took me about a minute before I started spilling my guts” and began to unload “all this s— that I was carrying around… The drugs, but mainly the betrayal of my mom who just was unconditional love for me, and she didn’t know that I had stolen money to get the drugs. And I just bawled my eyes out.”
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His theater teacher then suggested he transfer to Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica with a great theater program, which he says is where his journey began. From there, Black went to UCLA for theater, but he dropped out and pursued acting full-time after landing a spot in the Actor’s Gang Theater Company.
Since then, he has starred in many successful films, including “The Holiday,” “Nacho Libre,” all four “Kung Fu Panda” movies, “School of Rock,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and many others. He is also one half of the very successful rock duo Tenacious D. Despite his success in other realms of the industry, theater is where he truly feels at home.
“I had dreams there of being in the theater and having the power of flight, like I could fly like a superhero when I was in the theater, as I can use my powers and fly out of the theater doors and then immediately lose my powers of flight and just be a regular human,” he said of his time at Crossroads. “And that was just a perfect dream that I still remember that captured the power of that creativity. The theater and that world will always be the main thing.”
