The 2016 scene that spiked Johnny Knoxville with ecstasy: “I was just a trainwreck”
Next week sees the final instalment in one of the most chaotic movie franchises in history hit cinemas, as Jackass: Best and Last arrives in a nostalgia-fuelled orgy of cartoon violence, bodily fluids, bad decisions and complaints about being way too old to be doing it.
It’s the fifth Jackass movie proper since Johnny Knoxville and co took their insane antics from MTV onto the big screen some 26 years ago, and while it’s only 50% new stunts and 50% ‘greatest hits’, there’s still more than enough pain for a group of men well into their 50s to endure.
Knoxville is now white-haired but still the obvious instigator behind it all, standing just off-camera laughing and pointing Nelson Muntz style while his lifelong buddies endure scorpion bites, genital slaps, being shot out of cannons and all kinds of other ill-advised misery for the enjoyment of the viewing public.
And it was Knoxville who, in the mid-90s, as an aspiring writer and actor, came up with the idea of a gonzo-journalism magazine article about his testing out all manner of self-defence equipment like bulletproof vests, pepper spray and tasers, which then-editor and future Jackass director Jeff Tremaine commissioned, convincing Knoxville it would be a good idea to film himself doing it.
Together with Spike Jonze, the trio turned the footage into a clip show that tapped into a disaffected American youth trying to make sense of a new millennium, and Jackass was a global sensation; it seemed there wasn’t a country on earth that wasn’t entertained by feckless yanks throwing themselves off houses and giving themselves paper cuts.
While the original cable TV show only lasted three seasons, the movie spin-offs were multiple and went on and on, with bigger and bigger budgets required to properly translate the band of brothers’ desire for more elaborate ways to hurt themselves. By the time 2022’s Jackass Forever came around, the opening scene required an entire miniature city to be built, rigged with explosives, and it was the film on which Knoxville was charged at by a bull, causing him a broken rib, a broken wrist, a concussion and a brain haemorrhage.
Things were much more chill for him when he made a Jackass spin-off movie several years earlier, though, as he told The Sun, “We were filming a promo for Bad Grandpa at a frat house in Arizona. I was dressed as [recurring old man character] Irving, and was sitting in the audience with the students, and people kept handing me drinks, and someone dosed me with ecstasy.”
Knoxville elaborated, “About 30 minutes into the screening, my heart starts racing, and I’m like, ‘I am X-ing right now, someone dosed me’. I was so happy because I haven’t done X since my 20s. For the rest of the shoot, I was just a trainwreck, and we got a lot of funny stuff.”
Meanwhile, he has confirmed the latest Jackass movie will indeed be the last, and that it won’t be followed by a ‘.5’ update featuring deleted scenes as has been the case with previous films in the series. Once again, there promises to be some memorable moments, including Steve-O getting a prostate examination from a robot, and Jonze has once again got involved to direct the opening and closing scenes of the film.
