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Theres always going to be an adventure to what I do, he says.
Thats the part Ill always love.
How much longer can I be the stunts guy?
Then he lets out a loud laugh.
Too bad I didnt go to college!
Its been a few years since youve done a stunts-heavy project.
What made you want to get back to that withAction Point?
Did you land on some good middle-ground thinking then?Im in the thick of mulling it all over.
I do love the idea of an actor really doing his stunts with no cuts in the action.
That adds so much energy and immediacy to a film.
Some other actors do their own stunts, but the difference is that their stunts are designed to succeed.
And yours are designed to fail?Yeah, thats the only way mine are designed.
I still get scared to do them beforehand, but I can override that fear.
Yeah, its also my mom passed in the fall.
Im sorry to hear that.Thats okay.
We all have to deal with it at some point.
But you know, it got me to thinking about how that feels for a kid.
Wow, we started off really heavy.
Usually it takes a minute for people to get to the heavy stuff.[Laughs.
]Im just being honest!
And I appreciate it.
So your moms passing made you think about the work you do?One-hundred percent.
Tell me about that.Things can go seriously wrong at any time with a stunt.
And when that time comes I want it to be my choice.
Its hard to stop doing something you love.Honestly I may have a little left in me.
But for my sake and my familys sake, I should start winding down.
Or with anyone really.
And she said, I would like to talk about if you want to talk about it.
I just said, I dont want to go there.
Were you worried that talking about why you do stunts would make you stop doing them?Yeah.
I thought if I fixed that side of me then stunts would go away.
Its not like I dont get how crazy it all is.
But I guess you could also argue that shutting the discussion out isnotgetting it.
Its just odd doing it in the press and not with my therapist.
Its like, I already give up so much of myself to the public.
I cant give up all of it.
I understand.You know, what I do probably comes from a number of things.
Theres the open, fun, adventurous side of the coin.I was always a little inclined that way.
But I opened that side of me way up as I came into adulthood.
You know what I mean?
I hope Im not coming across like Im whining about some existential crisis.
People have real problems out there.
This is something I bring on myself.
Do you see any of theJackassspirit in the culture today?
Are you watching YouTube stunt videos?Im so insulated.
Ill film or come to the office and then Ill go home and be with my wife and kids.
Its embarrassing that I dont know more of whats going on with YouTube stunts.
I couldnt name anybody thats doing it.
Its completely passed me by.
Did you make a conscious decision afterBad Grandpato develop other aspects of your career that werent about stunts?
I didBad Grandpaand then I was working onBeing Eveland then I spent years trying to developAction Point.
I was also producing things and trying to pursue more dramatic work.
Yeah, I dont know.
I wonder how much my moms passing figured in the way Im thinking now.
Seems like quite a bit.Yeah.
I felt like I had to be that wild guy.
You dont even know at the time that youre only doing what you think people want you to do.
Youre just expending energy and not thinking about why.
Eventually I realized that you cant give so much to this idea of who youre supposed to be.
I guess Im realizing that with the stunts, too.
Nor did I want to.
Also I met my now-wife and I wanted to be a better person for her.
Then I got into it and thought,I gotta be a better person for me, too.
Id never really thought like that before.
I got what they were saying.
Things started to slowly come around.
Theyre still slowly coming around.
You mentioned Hunter S. Thompson, who youve pointed to before as an inspiration.
And I know that you love Jack Kerouac and that youre working on aDavid Allen Coedocumentary.
All these people Evel Knievel, too share a particular form of American male rebelliousness.
Hes a larger-than-life character.
I think of him and his buddy Jackie Gilbert as Kerouacian figures.
My dad is something else.
He ran a tire shop, right?Yeah, in the McAnally Flats in Knoxville [Tennessee].
Thats the area that Cormac McCarthy wrote about inSuttree.
And the guys that worked at the tire shop were huge characters, too.
They once suspected him of robbing a convenience store.
They took him to jail and said, Mr. Wilson, we have your fingerprints at the scene.
We know you robbed it.
And he said, You aint got my fingerprints I was wearing gloves!
And there was Big George, Big Sam someone took a box cutter to Big Sams face.
Jackie Gilbert would hitchhike across Central America at the drop of a hat.
Dad always had this group of guys around.
He was always performing like that.
So its his spirit youve been working in the whole time?Absolutely.
My mom obviously had a huge impact on me too.
My parents are such huge characters.
There was no other way for me to turn out, you know?
Something about the way youre describing your parents and your upbringing seems distinctly southern the vibrancy of it.
But the South is so often thought of as the seat of a lot of the countrys problems.
And that comes from the south, north, east, west were all in it.
Its pretty scary out there.
Ive found it weirdly reassuring lately to read about 1968.
Outside of 39 through 45 and 14 through 18, that was probably the scariest time for Americans.
Right, so there were reasons the culture embraced him.
Why did the culture embraceJackass?Jackasswas a wonderful mixture of ignorance, adrenaline, and serendipity.
A lot of people have tried to redo what we did but they cant capture it.
Capture what exactly?It was a special group of guys.
We loved each other.
Some people who venture to do what we did interpret it as macho or angry.
They forget that there was a real sweetness toJackass.
We gave each other hell, but we cared about each other.
I think people responded to that.
Beyond those things, I dont know why we took off.
I thinkJackass 3Dwas even screened at MoMA.Yeah,our films were at MoMA.But I hoped we werent making art.
I didnt think thats what we were doing.
Some performance art is great, but a lot of it just drives me up a wall.
I never wanted to that.
We just wanted to make each other laugh.
Its not for me to say whether its art.
I dont know what good thatd do me.
Itd probably make me nuts to get caught up in thinking that way.
This is a little random, but I talked toTom Greenonce and he suggested in a roundabout way Ackass-J?
He suggested that you guys copied some of his ideas.
What year did he start?
Then we saw Tom Green and I remember I was like, Aw, fuck!
Someone beat us to it.I felt like we were about to break and here he was.
But guys doing naughty things has been happening since forever.
I have no ill feelings.
Whenever Ive seen him hes been very civil.
But I can understand if theres a little hurt in there.
Was the transition out ofJackassdifficult?
I dont know, man.
What do you mean?I wish I couldve made better career choices during that period.
I was just living in the moment.
I remember talking to my therapist one day and she said this thing that I thought was brilliant.
She told you to think before you do things, right?Yeah, thought before action.
Thats how far gone I was, that some pretty basic fucking advice like that was amazing to me.
But it had never occurred to me before.
Things would come up and I just didnt make good choices.
When theres so many things going on inside you, its tough to be clear on what you want.
Like I said, there was no thought.
Id just hope they didnt end up hurting forever bad.
Thegiant-hand prankmakes me giggle because its straight out ofTom and Jerry.
I wasnt fond of that idea.
I knew it was a great opening to a scene but how do you end it?
You didnt see how it could pay off comedically?No, because I knew what the payoff meant.
But why would we do that?
I didnt think it was funny.
I dont want him missing a leg.
But we still shot it and Steve-O kicked the shark in the nose before it bit him.
Look, we didnt know where the line was.
It was constantly getting redrawn.
Can you explain the process of coming up with stunts?
How meticulously are you diagramming them out?Sometimes I draw diagrams with stick figures.
But forJackasswe could go anywhere and do anything.
We were pulling things out of thin air.
Thats wheregetting run over by a yakwhile I was smoking a cigarette blindfolded came from:Tom and Jerry.
So wed just go off in our minds and get ideas.
But forAction Pointthe process was more focused.
The stunts had to take place in theme park.
So wed think about what was the worst thing that could happen on those rides.
But when you say writing stunts thats what Im curious about.
So you have this incredible slide with many curves.
That was the goal.
Then you start talking about how to do it.
We have a stunt coordinator, Charlie Grisham.
Like when we flew out of the pool [inJackass 3D]with the Jet Ski.
In the old days, we wouldve gotten a Jet Ski that probably wasnt powerful enough.
Or our ramp wouldve been at the wrong angle.
So we wouldve gotten there on that day and the stunt wouldnt have worked.
And he did the same prep work for the alpine-slide stunt?Yeah.
Hes getting the right cart with the right wheels and stuff like that.
Im like, Are you fucking kidding me?
Can you hide the ambulance?
At least dont have the engine on.
I did land on my shoulder but my face absorbed all the energy of the impact.
Jesus.A good portion of my memory got erased for like an hour.It slowly started coming back.
I knew a few peoples names.
I knew that Id just done a stunt on the alpine slide.
I knew we were making a film but I didnt know what film.
I couldnt retrieve any other information.
It was a very serious concussion.
As soon as I blow my nose, my left eye pops out of its socket.
Id broken the orbital lamina ethmoid bone.
I pushed it back in and went to the emergency room.
You ever worry about CTE?Ive had 16 concussions overall.
Thats not a lot compared to, say,Mat Hoffman.
And these things affect every person differently.
No ones physiology is the same.
But of course I think about it.
I have a whole slew of doctors in my phone and a neurologist is one of them.
They ran tests, took some photos.
But like Willie Nelson says [singing],Theres nothing I can do about it now.
Is that true?Not the Tahiti part.
When we started, we would go in anywhere and start doing pranks.
Because if they dont sign, everything youve done is wasted.
So we started calling the store owners ahead of time.
Then wed go in and do the prank.
Theres a real art to that.
We hired people specifically for that job.
Some people just want to yell at you.
Some people just want to be calmed down.
But 95 percent of the time you might get them to sign without having to pay.
Im also auditioning for good dramatic roles.
Thats a lot of titles.
WhatsZombie Whorehouseabout?[Laughs.]
Theres a great line inthe short storyits based on: It aint cheatin if shes dead.
But as far as the future, well see where I come out.
Come out of what?Where I come out on the other side of doing stunts.
Whether I have a few more left in me or Ive done all that I needed to do.
And did I everreallyneed to do them?
I wrestled with those questions.
And as you’ve got the option to tell, I still am.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
