This Comedy Made Jack Black Feel Like A Sellout

“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 Black said in a 2006 interview about working with the Farrelly Brothers, per Far Out Magazine. “I wasn’t proud of it, and I got paid a lot of money, so, in retrospect, it feels like a sell out.”

The movie in question: Shallow Hal, in which Hal (Black) is hypnotized to see women’s inner beauty. That means he finds plus-sized Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) conventionally beautiful, even though the rest of the world sees her as obese. Adding to the “comedy” — Paltrow wore a fat suit for many scenes to play Rosemary’s girth for extra-large laughs. 

Whatever the movie’s good intentions — if you look past the weight, you just might fall in love! — audiences didn’t buy the fatphobic jokes. It’s hard to swallow the movie’s premise that beauty is only skin-deep when it’s so heavily invested in gags about breaking chairs and outsized splashes in the swimming pool.  

Black wasn’t the only one who had a lousy experience making Shallow Hal. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand, and I walked through the lobby,” Paltrow told The Guardian in 2006. “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.”

Poor Paltrow. But she didn’t have it nearly as bad as Ivy Snitzer, the young actress hired to play Paltrow’s body double in the movie. While the filming experience was positive, “it didn’t occur to me that the film would be seen by millions of people,” she told The Guardian last year. “It was like the worst parts about being fat were magnified. And no one was telling me I was funny.”

Strangers approached Snitzer on the street, attacking her for promoting obesity. “I got really scared,” she said. “I was like, maybe I’m done with the concept of fame, maybe I don’t want to be an actor. Maybe I’ll do something else.”

Given the tremendous blowback Shallow Hal has received over the years, it’s no wonder Black regrets his decision to get in the comedy bed with the Farrelly family. Which begs the question: Why is Black reteaming with Bobby Farrelly on this year’s Dear Santa if he’s so ashamed of their first collaboration? 

As he plays the holiday big man, let’s at least hope he’s foregoing the fat suit.