Jack Black Falls Victim To Jeremy Piven's Grudge-Fueled Director Cock Block
In Part Two of today's series, Howard Stern Gets Celebrities To Openly Shit-Talk Other Celebrities, Page Six is reporting that Jack Black recently told Stern about a six-year grudge held against him by Jeremy Piven, claiming the bitch-hugging bachelor is still sore over having lost the part of the record store clerk in High Fidelity to the paunchy screen comic:
JACK Black says Jeremy Piven is holding a six-year grudge against him because he beat the "Entourage" star for the role of the record-store geek in "High Fidelity." Black told Howard Stern on Sirius that as he talked to a director at a recent premiere, Piven "stepped in and all of a sudden he was talking to the director and I was standing there facing the back of his head. I was like, 'Whoa, dude! What are you doing? You just cut me off' . . . He turned around and there was this strange, awkward tension." Could he take Piven in a fight? "I don't know, apparently he's a yoga master," Black quipped. A Piven rep insisted, "He loves Jack Black."
The affront may come across as pettiness, but in Hollywood, where scene-stealing roles are as precious and battled over as blood diamonds, it's hardly unheard of for these kinds of lingering resentments to manifest themselves years later in strange and ruthless ways, as demonstrated by Piven's underhanded deployment of the collaborative equivalent of the cock block, the "director interceptor." Piven, of course, would ultimately earn the breakout role he so craved, but no number of Emmy wins can ever really mute the "what if?" sting of suspecting that had it been he singing Katrina and the Waves and playing second banana to rightful screen compadre John Cusack, who knows what kind of cinematic greatness he later could have achieved filling out Nacho Libre's red and blue tights with his sinewy, yoga-tautened body.