"So I went in one day and said, 'Can I have therapy?' and he said, 'Sure, sit down.'"

Jack Black talks about his treatment.

"...by about 15 I was in full meltdown. I was really searching for a father figure and I hooked up with a really bad crowd. My parents realised I was in trouble, so they pulled me out of high school and put me in this school where there were, like, 20 pupils and a therapist."

Your parents? Didn't you just say that you were searching for a father figure? Wasn't your dad around back then?

For the first and only time in the course of our conversation, Black - who could ramble on about most subjects until you stopped him - is lost for words. This is exactly how he replies: "There is dad. I don't know why he wasn't, er ... Yeah. I don't know why he wasn't, er ... but he was there. Er, my dad was a good dad but he, um, I'm just sort of ... For some reason I wished that I had a Harley-Davidson-riding heavy-metal dad, and that's what I went to find."

Did you try the therapy on offer to you at this point? "Some of the more intense kids were going in every day and I was, like, what happens in there? So I went in one day and said, 'Can I have therapy?' and he said, 'Sure, sit down.' "

Black recounts the experience as if looking back on a day at the spa: "I don't remember exactly how it went down, but I started confessing - 'cos as a Jew you don't have confessional, so I had years of guilt - and I told him about how I stole money from my mom to get coke, and I just cried and cried and cried my eyes out. Came out a different guy one hour later. Soooooo good."

And is he still the guy who came out, cleansed and purged, from that room? "I don't know," he admits. "I like to think that I'm not at odds with myself but I know that I still hide things..."

-in the Independent.