Jack Black and Tim Robbins Sign on for HBO Comedy
Jack Black and Tim Robbins will costar in and produce a pilot for a new HBO series called The Brink, according to Variety. The show will be a dark comedy that focuses on the ways in which a geopolitical crisis affects three different men in varying degrees of desperation. Black will portray Alex Coppins, a foreign service officer caught on the ground during the crisis, while Robbins will depict Walter Hollander, the short-fused U.S. Secretary of State who tolerates little from those calling shots in the White House Situation Room. The pilot is being written by Roberto and Kim Benabib; previously Roberto Benabib wrote and produced episodes of Weeds and Ally McBeal.
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Black has been laying low on the acting front of the past year or so, appearing only in shorts and shows like like Drunk History and the web series Ghost Ghirls. Last year, he appeared in the music video for “Wrong,” by the punk supergroup Off! He also released a new album with his comedy-rock group Tenacious D, Rize of the Fenix. Around the release of that album, he sat down with Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers to discuss why he proclaimed “Rock Is Dead,” a song title on Rize.
“When you think about rock at its origin, and you think of the Beatles and millions of kids screaming as loud as they can and running as fast as they can toward the Beatles, there’s no one who is that kind of lightning rod, who commands that kind of power and has that kind of creative magma,” he said. “I contend that the last band to really have that kind of power, I’m gonna say, was Nirvana. Who since Nirvana has been as big as Nirvana, in that way?”