People: So, he finally got his bearings

Finding his inner panda was not too much of a stretch for Jack Black. All it took was finding the essence of his inner Jack.

With Black providing the lead voice, the new animated comedy “Kung Fu Panda” is about an unlikely savior who finds that becoming the best version of himself is the true hero’s path.

For Black, the unlikely transition from character roles to leading man required a similar effort to define his own persona.

Before his breakout role as a condescending record-shop clerk in “High Fidelity,” he was more of a mimic than an actor. His side gig with the music duo Tenacious D changed that.

“I was always trying to kind of imitate the actors that I liked,” he says. “And then I kind of found my own voice when I wrote songs and sketches for Tenacious D. I was just being me.

“And that came through with ‘High Fidelity’ for the first time. It was just me doing my thing, and it’s the same thing as this movie: Be your own hero. It makes a lot of sense and resonates with me, because I feel there’s a lot of truth to that.”

Black, 38, previously dabbled in animation with voices as a tiger in “Ice Age” and a vegetarian shark in “Shark Tale” – the latter played as “kind of a nebbishy New Yorker, Woody Allen-type.”

For “Kung Fu Panda,” DreamWorks Animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the real Black – his own voice, his own personality.

“It was a fun experience not hiding behind a character voice this time,” Black says. “When you do the character voice, that can be fun and it can inform the character, but you also get distracted by that, and this way, I could just focus on what was funny in the scene.”

Growing up in Southern California, Black was an artsy kid, drawing, acting and singing. He joined the Actors Gang in Los Angeles founded by Tim Robbins, who cast him in small roles in “Bob Roberts,” “Dead Man Walking” and “Cradle Will Rock.”

After stealing all his scenes in “High Fidelity,” Black grabbed lead roles in such films as “Shallow Hal,” “The School of Rock,” “Nacho Libre” and “King Kong.”

Later this summer, he co-stars as a drug fiend of an actor stuck in the jungle with his war-movie castmates (including Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr.) in the Hollywood spoof “Tropic Thunder.”

Black and bandmate Kyle Gass played over-the-top versions of themselves in “Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny,” a fictionalized comedy about how their duo came together.

The movie came and went quickly at theaters, with critics finding it unamusing and self-indulgent. But like the band Tenacious D itself, the movie has picked up a bit of a cult audience, Black says, on DVD.

“A lot of enthusiastic stoners were like, ‘Yeah, du-u-u-de! Just saw it!’ ” he says.

“I was like, ‘Where were you when the movie came out?’ ‘Sorry, dude, I was hi-i-i-gh!’ “

The birthday bunch

Singer Tom Jones is 68. Actor Ken Osmond (“Leave It To Beaver”) is 65. Talk-show host Jenny Jones is 62. Actor Liam Neeson is 56. Actor William Forsythe is 53. Musician Prince is 50. Musician Gordon Gano (Violent Femmes) is 45. Rock guitarist Dave Navarro is 41. Actress Larisa Oleynik is 27. Actor Michael Cera is 20.