“I… am Steve,” Jack Black proudly declares in the first A Minecraft Movie trailer, but apparently he wasn’t always destined to be the blue-shirt wearing icon of Mojang’s mega hit. Instead, Black could have been playing a very different role.
According to Mojang’s senior director of original content Torfi Frans Ólafsson, Black was initially supposed to play a pig. “His character was originally a talking pig, and it was very, very, very late in the development where we had the idea to switch it to become Steve, because we needed an expert and host,” he told Variety. “This is not my Steve or your Steve — this is Jack Black’s Steve. A lot of fans responded when they saw the first teasers and trailers, like, ‘Hey, wait a minute — this is just Jack Black. This isn’t Jack Black being someone else.’ And maybe it is, because this is literally him interpreting this character and what it means to him.”
A lot of the movie is based around the idea that this is just an interpretation of Minecraft, rather than trying to make a canon story. “We’re not the official story,” said director Jared Hess. “We’re not canonizing anything. We’re just one of a zillion stories.”
Black apparently took the role of Steve rather seriously, spending more than 100 hours in Minecraft after the producers set up a game that all the cast could play in. “He was just completely manic, hoarding stuff in the mines, searching for lapis lazuli because he liked the way it sounds,” Ólafsson described.
A Minecraft Movie releases in theatres on the 4th of April.