Jackass legend Steve-O: "Johnny Knoxville staged an intervention - they locked me up in a psychiatric ward"

Ahead of his imminent new UK tour The Bucket List, which kicks off this week, we sat down with Jackass icon, former pro-clown and lifelong thrill/pain-seeker Steve-O to talk about his battles with addiction, the stunts he's filmed that were too wild for TV and the enduring appeal of a bunch of grown men hurting themselves for our entertainment. Here's what he had to say.

Jackass began airing in 2000 and was a success pretty much instantly. Why do you think there was this intense appetite for seeing you guys do these incredibly dangerous things?

“There’s some primal thing in our [human] DNA: we have such a survival instinct that we’re just programmed to be fascinated by threats to our survival. Just look at all the traffic that is created not by an accident in the road, but simply by people slowing down to get a good look at the carnage. There’s this syndrome of rubbernecking. There’s something in our DNA that compels us to be fascinated by carnage and failure.

“I think that the charm of Jackass is in us being able to not take ourselves too seriously. You can’t be super-macho in Jackass: you have to embrace the fact that you look uncool. That ability to not take ourselves seriously and be OK in compromising situations, I think, is endearing. Lastly, I think there’s something genuinely wholesome in that we invite all of the terrible things we go through but, when it comes to third parties, we’re really respectful.”

Did it still feel wholesome when you stapled your scrotum to your leg on-stage?

“Ha ha! That was something I did for my own side-project, but absolutely! I’ll explain why: the human experience is a real motherfucker. We have one instinct, which is to survive, but we’ve got one guarantee, which is that we won’t survive. No matter how good your life is, it’s gonna get awful – and that’s assuming you have a great life! People have all kinds of problems and stresses, and I can assure you that, for someone with any one of these problems, in that moment when they’re confronted with video footage of me stapling my ballsack to my leg, their problems are not an issue. I don’t purport to solve anyone’s problems, but I can make them go away temporarily. It’s why I’ve dubbed my profession as ‘distraction therapy’.”

Where did the ballsack-stapling idea come from?

“It was when I was working as a clown on cruise ships [in 1999]. We had to write up weekly reports and I was the only clown that had typing skills. It was me and this other clown in the office, and he’s just sitting there with idle hands and I’m typing away. [Out of boredom,] he grabs a stapler off the desk and then he opens it up and goes WHACK! He whacks his arm with the stapler and, sure enough, he’s got the staple in his arm. I’m just like, ‘Dude! That was awesome!’

“For some reason, we got paid in cash every two weeks, and we made $625 per week. So we got more than $1,000 every two weeks. The very next payday, I asked this clown for permission to steal his idea and he was super cool with it. I started this bit called The Thousand-Dollar Man, where I whacked staples into dollar bills all across my arms and my chest. Then, when we were filming the Jackass series, I said, ‘Let me staple some shit to my body.’ That’s when we stapled the letters of Jackass across my butt cheeks.

“When I started touring the next year, I had the females in the audience throw their bras and panties on-stage so I could staple them to myself. I got drunk enough and had done enough cocaine one night where I thought, ‘If I can use a staple gun, I’ll staple my ballsack to my leg.’”

When did you realise the drinking and drugs needed to stop?

“It was evident that I had a problem way before Jackass. When I was a clown in the circus, I was backstage peeling off my nose and snorting cocaine. I’d go through a whole weekend of shows and not sleep for, like, three days in a row. I had a problem with drugs and alcohol and I was perfectly resigned to just dying: living a life and dying a death of active drug addiction and alcoholism. I thought I was a lost cause, a write-off.

“It just so happened that Johnny Knoxville and some of the people in our Jackass world staged an intervention: they locked me up in a psychiatric ward, and I was locked up long enough and exposed to the right kind of message that I realised, ‘Wow, I have to do something.’ I’ve been sober ever since.”

Have you ever filmed anything so insane that it couldn’t be shown?

“Yeah, there’s a good little bucket of ‘too hot for Jackass’ things that never saw the light of day. It’s interesting: my Bucket List tour is multimedia. When the doors open, people walk into the theatre and there’s a screen, so I thought, ‘Why not make a pre-show?’ The pre-show starts with a video of what Jackass could not show.”

What kind of stuff do you show?

“A lot of people know that [Johnny] Knoxville did the self-defence thing [a stunt in the Jackass pilot where he gets pepper-sprayed, tasered and shot with a stun gun]; a lot of people don’t know that it ended with him shooting himself in the chest with a .38-calibre handgun to test out a bulletproof vest.”

How’d that go?

“The gun went fucking flying! He wanted someone else to shoot him but nobody would, because they thought they might kill him. So he shot himself holding the gun backwards, which he thought was even scarier. I think that the kickback of the gun flying so far took some heat off the bullet. There was another one, before Jackass, where Knoxville goes, ‘Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville, and I’m about to get hit by a car real soon.’ Sure enough, a car comes tearing through the frame and takes him out!”

Didn’t you also film some brand-new stunts for the tour?

“Yep! There’s one [clip] with a medical professional in disguise, administering stolen anaesthesia drugs into my vein while I’m riding a bicycle. I loved that so much that I got another medical professional in disguise to put a four-inch needle into my spine and inject drugs into my spinal cavity, which rendered me paralysed while I was in a full sprint through a field. The closer of the show is called Skyjacking, which is where I ejaculate as I fall out of an aeroplane, butt naked, with another man strapped to my back.”

The UK leg of Steve-O's 'The Bucket List Tour' kicks off on 30 June and tickets are available now at steveo.com.