If you wish to know the which means of life, simply ask Steve-O. “Folks act prefer it’s some form of riddle of the Sphinx, when the reply is so goddamn apparent,” says the 49-year-old sage of self-abuse; the guru of gnarly stunts. A lifetime of unwise choices – swimming with sharks, setting himself on hearth, repeatedly stapling his nuts to his leg – has gifted the Jackass star a uncommon form of knowledge.
“The which means of life is: ‘Choose one!’” he tells NME emphatically. “Life has the which means that you just give it: no matter it’s you select to make your life significant, fuckin’ go after it with enthusiasm. If you happen to break the phrase ‘enthusiasm’ right down to the foundation language you’ve gotten ‘en-theos’, which implies ‘with God’. Once you’re pursuing one thing you’re deeply obsessed with, you might be, by definition, doing God’s work. For me, shoving shit up my ass is God’s work.”
“For me, shoving shit up my ass is God’s work”
His wheezing giggle is so loud it wakes his canine Wendy and Lucy, who’ve been snoozing on the sofa beside him. We’re in the lounge of Steve-O’s picturesque dwelling within the Hollywood Hills, the home that “shoving shit up my ass” purchased. Together with the canine, he additionally shares this secluded slice of heaven together with his fiancée Lux, three cats and a mean-looking trio of goats named Drake, Sam and Phil. “We wished to provide all of them evil names,” Steve-O explains with a mischievous grin. “So these are quick for Dracula, Samhain and Mephistopheles. Me-phil-stopheles.”
Downstairs, there’s an edit suite piled excessive with personalised skateboards, assorted merch and a video archive documenting Steve-O’s lengthy historical past of on-camera idiocy. It’s there that he and his crew lower collectively movies for his thriving YouTube channel (6.3 million subscribers) and plot his outrageous dwell reveals, which have turn into notorious for inflicting viewers members to move out with shock. Quickly he’ll be on his approach to Britain to carry out and file what may simply be his wildest creation but: The Bucket Listing Tour.
“It’s like attending a screening of footage that was too excessive for Jackass, which I personally host and stroll you thru, with the entire behind-the-scenes, juicy, fucked-up shit,” he explains with evident pleasure. “It’s hilarious.”
There’s a sure poetry to Steve-O returning to London to movie this XXX-rated fruits of his life’s work. Though he appears as American as having intercourse with an apple pie, Steve-O was born Stephen Glover in Wimbledon in 1974. He didn’t keep in south London for lengthy, although: when Steve-O was six months outdated, his father – a high-flying, always-working company government – grew to become president of Pepsi-Cola in Brazil and moved the household to Rio De Janeiro. All through this time, his mom suffered severely from alcoholism. Steve-O’s first phrases have been in Portuguese, spoken to the maids who raised him. It doesn’t look like a stretch to attract a line between this lack of parental oversight and the exhibitionist life-style Steve-O went on to pursue. “I don’t suppose it’s a must to be Sigmund Freud to make that connection,” he says with a wry smile. “Possibly I used to be eager for a bit extra consideration from my dad and mom. Possibly I developed a case of hardcore attention-whoring.”
On the age of 9, Steve-O moved again to London, the place he spent his formative teenage years at The American College in St John’s Wooden. He has a UK passport to go together with his American and Canadian ones, however doesn’t really feel all that British other than a latent habit to pickled onion-flavoured Monster Munch (“that shit is fucking crack”). After college he went to college in Miami, the place he received extremely drunk, jumped off some buildings, flunked out and spent three years homeless. Feeling like an excessive amount of of a failure to ask his household for assist, he supported himself by promoting his physique for medical experiments. “I had it in my head that I wished to be a crazy-famous stuntman, and this simply match proper in,” he remembers. “I used to be like, ‘I’m having medicine for pigs and cows examined on me, as a result of I’m gnarly!’”
After transferring in together with his sister, Steve-O determined to pursue his stuntman aim severely in 1997 by enrolling within the Ringling Brothers And Barnum & Bailey Clown School. There he discovered invaluable transferable abilities, like stilt-walking and methods to stability a ladder in your chin. His breakthrough, although, got here when he satisfied skater journal Huge Brother to incorporate his stunts of their compilation movies. “Even hardcore skate boarders will lose their minds attempting to look at an hour of nothing however skateboarding,” he factors out. “From the very starting, skateboard movies needed to have completely different shit to interrupt up the monotony. I made it my job to do the craziest shit in skate movies.”
Huge Brother editor Jeff Tremaine would go on to turn into one of many creators of Jackass, together with director Spike Jonze and host Johnny Knoxville. “They have been like, ‘These movies are so well-liked: we must always subtract the skateboarding, and simply the loopy shit ought to be a TV present,’” recollects Steve-O. “That labored out nice for me!”
Steve-O solely seems briefly within the first episode of Jackass, however the second episode – first broadcast in October 2000 – made him an in a single day celeb. That was all due to The Goldfish Trick, during which Steve-O swallowed a dwell goldfish after which vomited it right into a bowl. When he dreamed up the stunt a 12 months earlier he’d deliberate to drink gallons of water beforehand, however there was no time to organize on the day the Jackass crew requested him to movie it. The digicam ended up staying on him for nearly two gruelling minutes as he choked, spluttered and ultimately, miraculously, retched up the still-swimming fish. “The very fact it grew to become this drawn-out, two-minute battle is what made it so epic,” Steve-O remembers. “As quickly as we wrapped, Johnny Knoxville stated: ‘Properly Steve-O, in the event you weren’t well-known already, I’d say you’re gonna be well-known now!’” Knoxville was proper: “Actually the subsequent day after the goldfish bit aired, in every single place I went I used to be recognised.”
Jackass shortly grew to become a cultural phenomenon, pulling in tens of millions of viewers. “We have been the highest-rated half-hour program within the historical past of MTV, and the least they’d ever spent,” recollects Steve-O. “It had essentially the most shoestring price range, so Jackass represented the most important revenue margins TV had ever seen.” MTV had an enormous hit on their palms, however they have been quickly beginning to fear about what they’d unleashed.
“Individuals are so fucking puss-ified!”
“No sooner was the present out than little youngsters began exhibiting up in hospitals,” remembers Steve-O. “If we’re trustworthy, the don’t-try-this-at-home warning at first wasn’t a warning: it was a fucking dare.” MTV tried to tame the beast, which happy no person. “They began introducing extra fuckin’ guidelines, and refusing to indicate extra shit,” he provides. “They have been watering it down, and Knoxville wasn’t having it: so Knoxville give up.”
Today, the unique seasons of Jackass can be found on the streaming service Paramount+, however they now include an extra pre-credits warning: “This program is airing in its authentic type with outdated social norms”. When NME informs Steve-O of this, he says it’s the primary he’s heard of it.
“Wow! God, individuals are so fucking puss-ified!” He doesn’t consider the present deserves to be seen as outdated. “I feel Jackass ages fairly effectively,” he says. “The spirit of it’s actually healthful. For all of the horrible shit that we do to ourselves and one another, we’re such keen members. We’re simply consideration whores battling for display screen time, and we would like the horrible shit to be taking place to us so badly that there’s nothing flawed with having fun with seeing it occur. Not one of the pranks are malicious or mean-spirited.”
Jackass ran for simply three seasons on MTV from 2000 to 2001, however the next 12 months it was resurrected as Jackass: The Film. Shot with a price range of $5million, it went on to gross over $60million within the US alone. Its success spawned the 2006 sequel Jackass Quantity Two, which featured Steve-O pushing a fish hook by way of his cheek and diving into shark-infested waters to behave as human bait. He considers the movie to be the group’s best work. “We have been in our prime,” he says fondly. “We have been uncontrolled, however the whole lot labored.”
One other sequel, Jackass 3D, adopted in 2010, and the gang reunited as soon as extra for final 12 months’s Jackass Perpetually. The movie was one other field workplace smash – raking in $80million in opposition to its $10million price range – however for Steve-O, the manufacturing was additionally one thing of a wake-up name. “This final Jackass film… it was form of a bummer, man,” he says. He singles out a scene during which Johnny Knoxville was left with mind harm after being flipped within the air by a bull. “It’s not enjoyable to look at Knoxville get hit within the head any extra,” he provides. “I wrote this textual content to the entire solid that day, thanking Knoxville for the sacrifices he’s made for this staff, and in addition begging that he stops with the mind trauma. It was one in every of my extra severe and honest messages.”
He even discovered a few of his personal stunts to be underwhelming, such because the scene during which he and Machine Gun Kelly pedalled stationary bikes till a large foam hand knocked them right into a swimming pool. “I like Machine Gun Kelly; I simply want the precise stunt we had him take part in had been at a better stage,” he says. The pair first met a decade in the past when Steve-O featured on a remix of MGK’s ‘Wild Boy’ (which options the repeated chorus: “Yeah bitch, name me Steve-O”). They quickly realised they have been kindred spirits. “We did one thing that was deemed ‘not hip-hop pleasant,’” Steve-O remembers with fun. “We each shaved our pubic hair, and I blended it collectively and rolled a joint of pure pubic hair. Then we each smoked it: I don’t suppose that ever noticed the sunshine of day! The powers-that-be at Unhealthy Boy Information have been like: ‘Yo dude, we don’t smoke dude’s pubes over right here.’”
“Machine Gun Kelly and I shaved our pubic hair – after which we smoked a joint of it”
One member of the unique crew who didn’t return for Jackass Perpetually was Bam Margera, who has had a protracted historical past of habit and authorized troubles. On the time of our interview, Margera is at the moment in a detox facility (he has now reportedly left), and Steve-O says he hopes he’s lastly getting the assistance he wants. “I’d love to listen to one thing encouraging, that he’s determined to cease blaming all of his issues on different folks,” he says.
Steve-O himself has been sober for 15 years. “I owe the whole lot to my sobriety, and I actually made an effort to encourage Bam to decide on sobriety,” he says. “It’s a disgrace you could’t make folks wish to get higher. He’s not going to get higher as a result of I need him to get higher, and I can’t make him wish to get higher. If he ever does select restoration then, man, I’m right here for him.”
Though his Jackass days could now be behind him, that doesn’t imply Steve-O has stopped pushing himself to tug off ever extra grotesque, playful and astonishing stunts. He’s been performing dwell on stage because the early days of Jackass, when he constructed his Don’t Strive This At Residence tour round performances that wouldn’t be allowed to be proven on MTV. That very same ethos applies to The Bucket Listing Tour.
“I wished this to be a showcase for what can’t be proven on Jackass, so I needed to go about filming new footage that I might inform tales about,” he explains. These embrace such death-defying, life-affirming feats as Skyjacking, during which he jerks off whereas leaping out of a aircraft. He’s very pleased with it. “Dude, it’s my favorite factor in the entire world. That’s my Mona Lisa,” he says, smiling. “You may’t present Skyjacking on Jackass as a result of that’s me blowing a load on digicam: that’s truly triple-X rated.”
That’s not all: there’s additionally one thing known as The Vasectomy Olympics, which, he says, is “the first perpetrator for making dudes move out within the viewers”. Then there’s the bit the place he’s given a (stolen) epidural injection and units off at a full dash together with his palms cuffed behind his again till he turns into paralysed from the waist down. “There’s some life-threatening, illegal-as-fuck, high-level shit that might by no means be proven on Jackass,” he grins.
For sure, each final minute of it’s carried out with the utmost enthusiasm. Steve-O, in any case, is doing God’s work.
Steve-O’s ‘The Bucket Listing Tour’ involves the UK from June 30
Pictures: Mike Blabac
