Johnny Knoxville’s worst non-‘Jackass’ injury: “It looked like Picasso drew me”
Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves get praise for doing a majority of their own stunts, but no one has sustained more critical injuries during the filmmaking process than Johnny Knoxville.
Knoxville and his brand of humour may not be for everyone, but it’s hard not to admire the sheer commitment that he has put into the Jackass franchise. It’s one thing to look ridiculous onscreen for the bemusement of others, but he and his friends have frequently put themselves in real danger, as none of the pain they express on screen is fake.
The man is actually a much better actor than he has been given credit for, and clearly knows his stuff when it comes to classic cinema, and although the majority of his career has been dominated by Jackass sequels and subsequent projects, he’s wracked up an impressive degree of interesting credits, including acclaimed films like Elvis & Nixon, The Luckiest Man in America, Lords of Dogtown, and Gregg Araki’s upcoming dark comedy I Want Your Sex.
He has managed to employ the skills acquired during the Jackass films within other projects that toe the line between fiction and reality, including the 2018 slapstick comedy Action Point, which, akin to Knoxville’s previous star vehicle, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, tells a traditional narrative story that is interspersed with real footage of actual stunts.
Knoxville starred in Action Point as DC Carver, the owner of an out-of-control amusement park filled with dangerous rides, and even if it included more of a story, the actor told EW that he sustained an injury during production that rivalled anything that his body had experienced during Jackass.
“I got a gnarly brain-erasing concussion, and I didn’t even know about the blowout fracture in the broken orbital lamina until I got back to the hotel after the emergency room when I blew my nose and my left eye popped out,” Knoxville said, “My orbital lamina bone, they said, it didn’t break, it just powdered. It disappeared.”
While a typical Jackass film would allow him to proudly display his injury for the rest of the production, Action Point was still a narrative feature that required a degree of consistency. In order to ensure that the injury wasn’t distracting, Knoxville said that the crew of Action Point had to find creative ways to shoot around him.
“They could only shoot me on the right side of my face after that because it didn’t look right,” he recalled, “It looked like Picasso drew me, and I couldn’t sneeze for six weeks, then a couple of nights later, I was walking around with Pontius and he said something hilarious, and for whatever insane reason, I grabbed my nose when I laughed and my eye popped out again.”
As graphic as Knoxville’s injury ended up being, it failed to generate any more enthusiasm for Action Point, which bombed in theatres during the summer of 2018, with some critics referring to it as one of the worst films that they had ever seen. Perhaps the failure was a sign to Knoxville that he should return to his roots, and Jackass Forever, the most recent film in the franchise, ended up being both the highest-grossing and best-reviewed, suggesting that he had managed to completely revive his career.
