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Although it’s not on our list of R-rated comedies that earn their R ratings, I’d say Tropic Thunder definitely qualifies. The controversial 2008 movie, which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, follows a group of actors becoming stranded in the Vietnam jungle while shooting a movie about the Vietnam War. In the midst of all the swearing, gore and gunfire, Jack Black’s Jeff Portnoy is shown going through drug withdrawal after losing his stash of “jelly beans” to a bat, and eventually he ends up tied to a water buffalo. As it turns out, shooting the movie with this animal resulted in Black storming off the Tropic Thunder set, but fortunately, this story ends on a heartwarming note.
Jack Black recounted the incident with the water buffalo while appearing on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. After the title host shared his story about the time he got on a water buffalo for his TBS show, was thrown off and ended up with a hematoma, Black confirmed that he’d gone through the same experience when he was working on Tropic Thunder in Kaua’i, Hawaii. The School of Rock alum admitted that he’s “afraid of animals,” so he was understandably concerned about being put onto the water buffalo for a scene. He continued:
I had been assured everything’s cool, so I got off the back of it, and I’m supposed to come around the bend on this mountain path, and I’m just in my underpants. I think I’m strapped to the buffalo because I’m going through drug withdrawals at the same time, so I’m a sweaty mess. And the buffalo I can tell is just a little bit uncomfortable. And they say ‘Action!’, and we start moving, and I’m like, ‘Uh oh, what’s happening here?’ Maybe it sensed my fear, but it was uncomfortable, and it just started bucking bronco. And I was like, ‘Ahhhhh!’, and I flew off of that thing and I went ass over tea kettle. I think, because there’s no footage of it… we hadn’t entered frame yet. We were right behind the mountain, we were coming around, and I flew and did a little flipty-do and landed miraculously between two boulders and did not get injured at all.
To provide a little more context, Jeff Portnoy was strapped to the water buffalo not just because of the withdrawal, but because he was pretending to be the prisoner of Robert Downey Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus, who was disguised as a rice paddy farmer, so they could break into the Flaming Dragon heroin factory and rescue Ben Stiller’s Tugg Speedman. Alas, the Tropic Thunder script did not call for the water buffalo to toss Portnoy off, so it’s fortunate that Jack Black landed the way he did, or he could have been badly injured. Upon getting his bearings, Black lost his cool, though given what he said below, I don’t blame him:
Ben [Stiller], I could hear him off in the distance say, ‘What’s going on? Are we cutting? Jack, take it from the top! We didn’t get any of that.’ I was like, ‘No, you take it from the top! You get on that fucking buffalo!’ Because I had so much adrenaline inside me. I saw my life flash before my eyes. And then I stormed off to my trailer just because I was shaking and not in any mood to be in the movie anymore.
Because of this harrowing ordeal, Jack Black’s stunt double, Jimmy Waitman, stepped in and got onto the back of the water buffalo so the rest of those scenes could be shot. But here’s the final twist: the animal didn’t toss Jack Black off just because it was angry. As the actor explained:
I don’t remember how long after that event took place, someone said, ‘Jack, you know what we found out? That water buffalo was pregnant. No one knew it had a baby inside it, and that’s why it was freaking out, because it was uncomfortable.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck me, man, there’s gotta be a way they should know that before they put me on the back of a gigantic power beast.’ And then at the premiere, someone was there that said, ‘You know what they named the baby? Named him Jack.’
Isn’t that sweet? I agree with Jack Black that it would have been nice if the animal trainers had known that the water buffalo was pregnant, but at least he got a water buffalo named after him. Does that make up for what he went through? Definitely not in Conan O’Brien’s eyes, but Black capped off that portion of the podcast episode saying he’d like to meet Jack the Water Buffalo.
Jack Black’s latest movie, Borderlands, is now playing on the 2024 release schedule, and he’ll next be seen co-starring with Jason Momoa in the 2025 movie Minecraft. In 2022, it was reported that there are still plans to bring back Tom Cruise’s Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman for either his own spinoff or as a supporting character in a different movie, but there haven’t been any updates about that since then.