Did you hang out in funeral parlors to research the character? We were all just sort of sitting there and Rick said, “I’ve got this other thing that I’ve been working on for a long time - do you wanna do this instead?” So I read it and said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”īernie’s an interesting role - quite unlike anything you’ve played before. He and Mike White and me were in a room in Texas trying to figure out what it could be and we couldn’t all get on the same page, so it was kind of dead in the water. We were trying to write it, trying to get it. Jack Black: Well we were working on School of Rock 2.

It’s great to see you back together with Richard Linklater. We caught up with Black recently for a chat about the movie. When Bernie bumps her off, the locals rally around their folk hero, much to the chagrin of prosecutor Matthew McConaughey (working with Linklater for the first time since Dazed and Confused). In a strange-but-true story set in Carthage, Texas, Black plays soft-spoken Bernie Tiede, the small town’s beloved mortician who befriends its most despised citizen: wealthy, cantankerous old Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine). The actor and director first collaborated on 2003’s wonderfully pitched crowd pleaser The School of Rock, and their reunion for this week’s dark comedy Bernie has yielded what might be Black’s best performance since that film. Jack Black and Richard Linklater need to do more movies together.

Wiki bernie jack black movie