Abstract While extratropical forcing has far‐reaching effects through teleconnections, the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) has been shown to partly block the propagation of extratropical perturbations to the opposite hemisphere. However, the influence of the ITCZ location on the tropical response and the blocking effect remain poorly understood. We investigate this using aquaplanet slab‐ocean simulations in MPI‐ESM, by imposing a southern hemispheric extratropical cooling on five control states with different background ITCZ locations. Results show that the cross‐equatorial atmospheric energy transport sensitively depends on the mean ITCZ position, with cloud radiative effects dominating this sensitivity. We also demonstrate that the ITCZ blocks the propagation of sea surface temperature anomalies to the opposite hemisphere through changes in latent heat flux, which originate from the wind response to the imposed extratropical forcing. Our findings suggest that model biases in the ITCZ location may alter the modeled climate response to high‐latitude perturbations.