Jack Black on hanging out with Angelina Jolie, killing Shirley MacLaine

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For more than a week, Angelina Jolie and Jack Black have been flooding websites and magazines with their cutesy promotional stint hyping ‘Kung Fu Panda 2’ at the Cannes International Film Festival.

The Ministry caught up with Black on Tuesday at the L.A. fundraiser ‘Playlist for the A-List,’ a celebrity karaoke jam for UNICEF, where he expanded on (or rather, clarified the details of) his relationship with Brad Pitt‘s life partner.

‘We get along, it’s always cool to hang out,’ he said, acknowledging that he and Jolie are something of strange bedfellows.

For starters, they didn’t share the same mode of transport to Cannes. Jolie and Pitt have their estate, Chateau Miraval, in the south of France, from which they traveled to glamorous film festival.

Black was flown out on what he called ‘the Katzenberg Express,’ on the dime of DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg.

‘She and Brad have a place out there. I was not over there, I guess it’s like an hour away from Cannes, otherwise I’m sure I would’ve been invited,’ he cracked.

The Ministry asked Black, after his work and publicity with Jolie on two ‘Kung Fu Panda’ films, plus ‘Shark Tale’ in 2004, what he thinks is the biggest misconception about her? Following a pause so long we feared he would whip out a ‘Nacho Libre’ move on us, he simply said, ‘I don’t know her that well.’

It was a moment of refreshing honesty in a media cycle that tends to pin lifelong-friend status on stars who spend such fleeting time with one another.

Talk turned to his upcoming projects, particularly ‘Bernie’ -- a film in which he plays a small-town mortician who sparks a friendship with a widow played by Shirley MacLaine. Black’s character kills MacLaine’s, then goes to great lengths to convince townspeople that she’s still alive.

‘I think it’s my best work,’ Black said.

And what was it like to kill the legendary MacLaine?

‘Heavy,’ he said.

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-- Matt Donnelly
Twitter.com/MattDonnelly