Sleep-deprived, Black, wearing jeans, a plaid shirt and a backpack, waited for a ride to the hospital where his wife, Tanya Haden, was waiting to deliver their baby. (She did, the following day - Samuel Haden Black.)
Hess, 26, headed back to Salt Lake City where he lives with his wife and two young children, said Nacho Libre's absurdist comedy suited his star's flamboyant gifts, while serving as an apt follow-up to the 2004 indie comedy hit Napoleon Dynamite, which he directed and cowrote with his wife, Jerusha.
In Nacho Libre, loosely inspired by a real-life fighting priest, Black plays a cook at a Catholic orphanage who raises money for the children by secretly body-slamming rival luchadores at night.
Hess discovered the world of lucha libre (free-style fighting) a decade ago, when he came across a movie starring Mexico's most famous luchador.
"I was 15 years old, living in Idaho, and late one night on television they were showing all these Santo movies. It was not like anything I'd ever seen before: Here's Santo, this very dapper man with a silver mask, beating the crap out of a couple of mummies from Guadalupe, Mexico. From then on, I became a fan and hunted down more of his films."
By the time Santo came into Hess' life, Hess had interned as a camera assistant to a cinematographer friend of Hess' parents', and was practicing his nascent craft by filming backyard slugfests starring his siblings. "I was raised on Star Wars and E.T., plus I had five younger brothers so we were always dorking around and making karate videos on the trampoline. It was just fun, adolescent life."
