Jack Black has said that supporting gay
rights is a no-brainer.
In the film Bernie,
which opens Friday, Black plays Bernie Tiede, a small-town Texan who
befriends Marjorie Nugent (played by Shirley MacLaine), a widow known
for her sour attitude and fortune.
The film suggests that Bernie might be
gay, but the real-life Mr. Tiede on which the film is based has never
publicly acknowledged this.
In an interview with gay weekly Pride
Source, Black joked that Bernie's love for show tunes,
pedicures and curtain making doesn't necessarily mean he's gay.
“I've got two out of three there,”
Black said. “I've got a big musical-theater background from high
school. I was a big musical-theater nerd; Ben Vereen was my hero.
And pedicures – I love a pedicure. Someone's gotta scrape off the
cement down there on the heel. It's like the surface of Mars down
there. As for curtain making, that's where I draw the line. I just
have no interest in that. But I am sure there are straight dudes who
have the trifecta under their belts. I'm certain of it.”
And on supporting gay rights: “I've
got a lot of gay and lesbian friends and family, so it's personal to
me when people and the government start talking about them as less
than. It just seems like one of the no-brainers in our society.
There are not a lot of no-brainers where you're like, 'This is right
and that is wrong and I'm definitely on this side,' where you want to
go out and sing about it and do things. But it feels good to be on
the right side of history.”
(A video sing-along with Black in
Bernie is embedded in the right panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)