Jack Black, the versatile actor-singer, made a significant impact with his performance of the emotional piano rock ballad “Peaches” as Bowser in the box office hit The Super Mario Bros. Movie earlier this year. However, the hit song almost didn’t come to be.
Black revealed that when he initially signed on to the film, music wasn’t part of the plan. “They had this idea late, late in the game, ‘What if Bowser sings a song?’” Black tells The Hollywood Reporter, recalling a conversation with the film’s directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic. “They were like, ‘We got this little nugget,’ and they sent over this little 20-second song.” Despite his initial reservations about the film turning into a musical, Black, a Grammy-winning multihyphenate, found the short demo funny and likable enough to pursue.
“We fleshed it out and made it more of a song with more lyrics and melody and stuff. And I was like, ‘Ooh, this hits, this slaps. I bet you they won’t want to use this because it’s a little too deeply emotional,’” he says. “It stops being a little family cartoon for a second. It felt like it went into some other realm of deep, painful love that [Bowser will] never have — this deep yearning. It’s too real.”
Despite Black’s concerns, the directors loved it, and so did the rest of the world. “Peaches” became a viral hit, finding success on TikTok and the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart, where the song peaked at No. 56. The tune even reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Digital Songs Sales chart and ranks fourth on YouTube’s top trends of 2023 list.
