Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
I hear Johnny Knoxville’s Tennessee drawl before I see him. “I’m gonna getcha!” he barks – part children’s entertainer, part axe murderer – as he chases the small child of one of his entourage down the hotel corridor. “Where’s my little honey bunny?” His infectious cackle and her giggling shrieks ricochet into the room where I am waiting to meet him.
Knoxville has been provoking shock and delight for 22 years, ever since his TV show Jackass first aired on MTV. The formula was beautifully simple: a ragtag group of skateboarders and oddballs with a punk-rock aesthetic filmed themselves undertaking painful, grotesque DIY stunts – no context necessary. Audiences tuned in for the back yard suburban anarchy, but stayed for the gang’s camaraderie. It was absurd and puerile – the New York Times dismissed the film that followed the TV series as “a documentary version of Fight Club, shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest”.
Not many would have described Knoxville and co as visionaries when they started hitting each other in the testicles for laughs. But years before YouTube or Twitter, let alone the Kardashians or TikTok, it showed where culture was heading: towards reality TV and would-be celebrities putting themselves in danger for viral footage; towards the constant documenting of our lives for content.
Knoxville, 50, was born Philip John Clapp Jr. He grew up in the Tennessee city from which he took his stage name, the third and youngest child of a tyre company boss and a Sunday school teacher. He has often suggested the genesis of his career lies with his prankster father. “I grew up idolising him; he was my biggest comedic influence,” he says.
Philip Sr liked to trick his employees with laxative-spiked milkshakes or fake letters from sexual health clinics. His son was also a target. “Sometimes he would wake me up by throwing a glass of water in my face,” Knoxville recalls, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. “I’d wake up and, of course, I would laugh. He would just start telling me jokes – he couldn’t wait for me to be up so he could start telling me jokes!”
But his father’s influence ran deeper than giving him a bug for buffoonery. “I grew up always wanting to please people, because my dad drank pretty hard,” says Knoxville. “And when you grow up with an alcoholic father, you want to put out fires and make sure everything’s OK. That’s what you think as a kid, right? That you can help it that way.
“Maybe I didn’t love myself so much a lot of the time,” he suggests. “Maybe my self-worth had taken some hits.”
Knoxville’s body has taken plenty of hits, too. The “comedic masochist”, as he calls himself, has been hit by a riot-control mine, knocked unconscious by a heavyweight boxer and mauled by bulls on multiple occasions. He has suffered breakages, concussions, vertigo and a ripped penis, from his attempts to backflip a motorcycle. It has all been in pursuit of “good footage”. His career is one of the purest expressions of “no pain, no glory”.
But his sense of humour has remained intact throughout. He rarely stops laughing, often breaking into a smile that consumes his face, his eyes turning to slits behind thick, black-rimmed glasses.
Knoxville created Jackass with two longtime collaborators, the film directors/producers Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine, but of the trio only he did stunts. “It just naturally happened,” he says. “I have a big personality and sometimes I have to reel myself in. That’s something that, in therapy, I realised: like, wow, I can be a lot! So just have some cocoa and settle down.”
He has been in therapy since 2006. Although he admits he “probably got addicted to doing larger stunts”, he has so far resisted delving into that side of his psyche. “There’s other stuff that needs work,” he says. “I’m like: ‘Fix everything else. Let’s not mess with the side of me that does stunts, because I don’t want to know.’”
We are talking before the launch of Jackass Forever, the fourth of the films that grew out of the initial TV series. He was in his late 40s when it was filmed and you can see the mileage creeping in – the blows hit harder, recovery takes longer. But, judging by early box office results, audiences are not bothered. Even the critics have finally caught up, with GQ asserting that Jackass operates “at the intersection of a number of ancient American traditions”, with “traces of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges”. The New Yorker has saluted its “joyous vision of resilience in the face of obvious traumas”.
“Some things make us laugh when we read them, you know, when it gets too highbrow,” says Knoxville. “But who doesn’t like being compared to Buster Keaton? He’s a legend. And he’s as funny today as he was back then. Someone running and falling down is timeless. It’s just funny. Thank God, or I would have no career.”
Jackass Forever very nearly wasn’t funny. In one stunt, in which Knoxville stood in front of a charging bull, he was flipped, spinning into the air before landing on his head. He sustained a broken wrist, broken ribs and a concussion that left him with brain damage. It took him months to recover, including a course of antidepressants.
Did that brush with death change his perspective? “No,” he says, after a long pause. “I knew going into this film that this will be the last time I’m gonna be doing big stunts. I didn’t know I was going to get as injured as I did, but I brought that on myself. I have nothing to complain about, only things to be grateful for.”
His father died in hospital just before filming began on Jackass Forever. “He was my hero,” says Knoxville. “In the back of my mind, I was like: ‘God, I wanted to tell him we were making another film, because that would have made him so happy and lifted his spirits.’ But I didn’t get to do that.”
Despite his father’s drinking, Knoxville had a happy childhood and did well at school – for a while. “As soon as I hit puberty, I cast my protractor aside,” he says, with another of those big smiles. “I was no longer interested in school, because I didn’t feel like it was going to be very useful to me.” He set his heart on showbiz, moving to Los Angeles at 18.
“I wanted to be remembered,” he says. “I wasn’t making much money at all. I’m sure I was struggling, but I didn’t really look at it like that, because I was young and pursuing something I believed in.”
Plus, he adds: “I was young and in Los Angeles! It was so much fun that I took my eye off the ball for a number of years. I was more interested in going out and partying. It wasn’t until my then girlfriend, who became my first wife, got pregnant and we had a daughter on the way that I was like: ‘OK, I really have to figure out what I’m going to do to support this child.’ That’s what really kicked everything into high gear.”
He started writing for Big Brother, a southern California skateboard-and-culture magazine, where Tremaine was the editor and Jonze a photographer. He acted in TV commercials, with little concern about compromising artistic integrity.
“Oh, are you kidding? I was fucking thrilled!” he says. “You work for a day and then you get residuals. When Jackass got on TV, there were a handful of people who were like: ‘Oh, he sold out.’ I’m like: ‘Fuck you! I sold out years ago.’ I was advertising Dentyne Ice gum, Taco Bell, whatever I could do to support my family.”
One day, he pitched Big Brother a story in which he would test self‑defence equipment on himself (pepper spray, stun guns and so on). Tremaine suggested he film it. The resulting video was widely circulated on VHS, like a sort of analogue viral video. Before long, they were making Jackass for MTV.
The outrage at the resulting show was inevitable. There was disgust at its aggressively lewd, low-brow larks – and alarm that others would imitate them. The moral panic was fuelled by the Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, who said: “There are some things that are so potentially dangerous and inciting, particularly to vulnerable children, that they should not be put on TV.”
“I didn’t really care about the moral outrage,” says Knoxville. “But I didn’t like when we would have copycat incidents and kids would get hurt.” The public outcry forced MTV’s hand; lawyers and health-and-safety officials got involved. Defanged and demotivated (“They said you can’t jump off anything higher than 4ft!”), Knoxville quit – to make movies exactly the way he wanted to.
The franchise that began in 2002 with Jackass: The Movie has since spawned spin-off films such as Bad Grandpa, more TV shows, a video game and countless imitators.
“I went from no one knowing my name, working in a restaurant, waiting tables, to the cover of Rolling Stone, which is a big jump from a small town in east Tennessee,” says Knoxville. “It took a while for me to get my feet under me.”
Numerous Jackass cast members have spoken about their battles with drug and alcohol addiction, most notably Stephen Glover (Steve-O), who spent time in a psychiatric hospital (he is now sober). Knoxville doesn’t think you can blame his creation. “Everyone was doing that, quite honestly, before we started,” he says. “I guess you get a certain personality that does what we do, that lives hard and laughs hard. But we’re never loaded during shooting. If someone’s drinking, they can’t do stunts.”
Jackass Forever was the first film without Ryan Dunn, one of the original cast members, who died in a drink-driving accident in 2011. “It was crushing to have that spirit extinguished,” Knoxville says. “It’s something that we all are still dealing with and will be dealing with the rest of our lives. We all lost a brother.” For a while, he wasn’t sure he should make another film without Dunn. “But we all felt we still had something to say.”
Does Knoxville worry about dying? “I have fear, but I have a way to manage it. I’ve almost died a few times making Jackass over the years. But I’m still here,” he says, knocking the wooden table between us.
No nightmares about former stunts? No bulls hurtling toward him in his sleep? “No, the opposite. I laugh in my sleep. I just cackle,” he says. “My wife hears it. So, yeah, I go to bed feeling pretty good.” What does scare him, then? “Something happening to my children, my family,” he replies, earnestly. “I’m a father first, right? And I worry about them. That scares me.”
Knoxville lives with his second wife, Naomi, and their two young children, Rocko and Arlo (he also has a grownup daughter, Madison, by his first wife). He had tried to keep the younger kids blissfully unaware of his career – but then six‑year-old Rocko found out about the show from school friends. “I said: ‘Yeah, Dad has a silly show where he does pranks and stunts, but it’s not really appropriate for you to see.’ Especially for him, because he’s wired like my father. He has that rambunctious spirit and I’m afraid that he would want to do it. And that’s just not going to be on the cards.”
Does Knoxville ever think he is being selfish by putting his life on the line? Does he worry about how his wife and children might be affected? It is not as if Jackass is his only career option. As well as running Dickhouse Productions with Tremaine and Jonze, he has had acting roles in The Dukes of Hazzard, The Ringer and Men in Black II. He will soon be filming a new show for Hulu – a Steve Levitan project called Reboot. Then there is Big Ass Happy Family Jubilee, the radio show he does with his cousin, the singer-songwriter Roger Alan Wade.
“There’s risk,” Knoxville admits. The stunts “upset everyone. During filming, they’re worried – and for good reason. But, at the end of the day, this is what I do. And there’s a lot of people who have jobs that are dangerous. Can you imagine how a policeman’s wife feels? Or a fireman’s? I’m just a half‑assed stuntman.”
Jackass Forever is in cinemas now
