Steve-O from Jackass has written a self-help book, so let’s start with the most obvious question: who on earth is going to take life advice from a man who has repeatedly stapled his scrotum to his thigh?
“Oh, for sure,” he replies in his unmistakably gravelly voice. “The idea of a book of wisdom from me is a patently absurd concept.” Steve-O is speaking over Zoom from his tour bus in Canada, where he’s on the road with his Bucket List comedy show. He weighs up my question again. “The way I describe the book is that it’s 90% insane stories about my fucked-up life and maybe 10% nuggets of wisdom gleaned from having made so many terrible decisions. That 10% might not help you at all, but you’re gonna have an entertaining journey.”
A Hard Kick in the Nuts is not Steve-O’s first book. The 48-year-old’s 2011 memoir, Professional Idiot, documented his rise from desperate attention-seeking kid to, um, desperate attention-seeking adult who became the breakout star of Jackass, the infamous early 00s MTV show in which a bunch of dudes would perform outlandish DIY stunts. Steve-O snorted wasabi, lit fireworks from his bottom and nearly got eaten alive by dunking himself into the ocean as shark bait (complete with a hook pierced through his chin). He was puppyish and lovable, but back then he was also a complete mess, an unreliable alcoholic who was so strung out on cocaine that he was once able to scoop a lump of congealed snot and coke from his nostril and smoke it in a homemade pipe (“I called it ‘crack boogers’,” he notes).
In the decade since that book, Steve-O has gone through a lot: he has kicked drugs and drink with the 12-step programme and overcome the many addictions that have sprung up in its place – sugar, sex, spending (he calls it “addiction whack-a-mole”). He has also built an impressive career that incorporates the hit Wild Ride! podcast, a YouTube channel with more than 6m subscribers and a standup comedy career built around retelling his craziest real-life stories. (Sample line: “If your cover-up tattoo is a man fucking an ostrich, that’s when you know you started off with something pretty rotten.”)
During all of this, Steve-O has found love, settled down in LA and become incredibly serious and boring – as proved by the recent Jackass Forever movie, in which he smeared his penis and testicles in honey and released a hive of bees on to them. Or the YouTube clip where his friend fired a cannon of dog poo into his face at such close range that it perforated his eardrum. Or his plans to … OK, so maybe he’s not got that boring.
“I used to be a drunk attention whore,” he says, “and now I’m a sober attention whore. That’s kind of my deal.”
Indeed, while A Hard Kick in the Nuts might sound like a ridiculous premise, it actually contains a startling amount of soul-searching – and jaw-dropping honesty: Steve-O recounts the numerous women he love-bombed and then ghosted; he examines the endless grief he has given his former friends and neighbours with reckless and selfish behaviour; he even admits to campaigning behind the scenes to get his late Jackass co-star, Ryan Dunn, kicked off a show they were co-presenting because he thought he was a big enough star to do it alone. Steve-O’s need to confess seems to be as compulsive as any of his addictions.
“I remember recording the audiobook,” he says, “and as I started reading out loud what I’d put down on the page, I had this strong feeling, like, ‘Oh my God, why am I putting this out there?’ At times I couldn’t believe what I was reading. But the stories are 100% true. And there’s something really powerful about including ugly truths, which are just so deeply unflattering. It becomes quite clear early on that I’m not writing the book to make myself look good.”
And yet … it’s hard not to come out of the book liking Steve-O, even though you’ve just read 200-plus pages of him doing largely terrible things. The book is full of what his friend, Jackass co-creator Johnny Knoxville, described as “so much growth”. The self-help angle might seem flimsy, but the overall message of examining your mistakes, understanding your faults and trying to become a better person is admirable.
That doesn’t mean it’s not also entertainingly weird. A case in point: when Steve-O sought help for his sex addiction, a therapist suggested he try a month or two of celibacy to rewire his brain. Steve-O’s insistence on taking everything too far meant he ended up going 431 days without sex or even ejaculating. He was so determined to abstain that, he says, he would somehow wake himself from sexual dreams.
“It was a crazy thing, and I don’t think it was particularly helpful or healthy,” he says. How did it affect his daily behaviour?
“Oh God. I was on a standup comedy tour for the majority of that time and as part of my routine I would announce, each night, how many days it had been since Elvis had left the building. And that tour was – well, a fucking disaster is what it was. If people were chatting in the audience or anyone was recording the show on their phone, I just flew off the handle. My capacity for losing my temper was impressive. Really impressive.”
Steve-O is a seasoned standup these days and always gets a laugh for his opening line: “I’m in a terrible situation … I’m Steve-O in my 40s.” This fear of ageing has been a constant as long as he can remember. Born Stephen Gilchrist Glover in Wimbledon, south London, Steve-O’s childhood was spent on the move thanks to his father’s work as a corporate executive. He lived in Brazil, Connecticut, Florida and Toronto among other places. He always assumed he’d die young so spent his time filming himself doing crazy stunts – the best way to leave a legacy, he reasoned. An early school report famously said: “Socially, Steve’s attempt to impress his peers frequently has had the opposite effect.” Yet he found his calling when he was accepted onto Jackass, the brainchild of Knoxville, film-maker Spike Jonze and then-skateboard magazine editor Jeff Tremaine.
More recently, though, Steve-O has found himself facing what he calls “a midlife crisis on steroids”. The man who built a career on firing hard objects into his balls now invokes eastern spirituality and Buddhist philosophy in order to wrestle with western society’s approach to ageing and why it disturbs him so much. “We shove old people in nursing homes because we don’t want to think about our own mortality,” he says. “When you get old, people don’t want to see you. So if, like me, you have this overdeveloped need for attention – and that’s putting it mildly – then the idea of people no longer looking at you is scary.” The cliche of the washed-up clown performing old tricks to a dwindling audience gives him nightmares. But film-maker and comedian Kevin Smith, a recent guest on his podcast, told him he could envisage Steve-O as a modern-day George Carlin, the countercultural comedian who remained popular, edgy and cool into old age. “And God, I’ve been hanging on to that ever since!” he laughs.
One plan for longevity rests on what he refers to as his Gone Too Far tour, a future standup show that he hopes will continue his unique combination of comedy and filmed stunts, only this time “raising the bar for crazy”. This will involve having breast augmentation surgery and inking a tattoo of a penis on his forehead, although one plan he mentions in the book – shooting a bullet through both of his cheeks – is no longer happening. “I’ve taken that off the table,” he says, a little embarrassed. “I’m not known for saying I will do something and then backing out … but I’ve lost my sense of humour for guns. I no longer find it fun or funny to seek to shoot myself.” Fair enough. But what about the breasts? I mean, why that specifically?
“The theme that ties together all of these ridiculous acts is an examination of my body and how, on the cusp of turning 50, the instrument I rely on for attention is breaking down,” he says. “As we barrel towards our inevitable demise, we wilt, and our bodies deteriorate, and it’s this really sad dark thing. And that process is well under way for me.”
And so he’s fighting this existential dread with a boob-job?
“That came from me being legitimately horrified to look in the mirror and discover that not only am I developing man tits but I literally have underboob too. And so I’m childishly lashing out at the God that enabled me to develop man titties. Like, if I’m going to be forced to have titties then goddamn it they’re going to be DDs!” He laughs his dirtbag laugh and then says, referring to the 19th-century American showman: “I think the PT Barnum in me just thinks that makes sense. It will be the tour that promotes itself.”
The penis tattoo follows a similar line of thinking: “I feel compelled to draw attention away from the increasing wrinkling going on around my eyes. Clearly, a big dick on my forehead is all anybody’s going to be able to see, so it’ll keep me young.” What could be more rational?
Since 2017, Steve-O has been in perhaps his first functional relationship, with Lux Wright, a 35-year-old production designer. They plan to marry and open an animal sanctuary (kids are off the agenda ever since Steve-O filmed himself having a vasectomy and then inviting local teenagers to beat his balls like a piñata immediately afterwards). I wonder what Wright makes of his Gone Too Far plans?
“She really hates the boobs thing,” he says. “But she’s come around a little bit. I consulted with arguably the world’s most famous plastic surgeon and he said that he thinks after a period of three months it will be easy to put back together. The penis on my forehead will ultimately be lasered off, too. So I will be restored to usual.”
Steve-O describes Wright as “exceedingly normal”, which is an interesting choice of words for someone who was happy to film their partner taking a dump in their living room on top of a whirring fan and get sprayed with faeces as a result. (The resulting footage is shown as part of Steve-O’s Bucket List tour.) That’s how he knew she was the woman for him?
“Yeah,” he laughs. “There’s certain things she’s perfectly fine with which you would think she wouldn’t be. Then there’s the life-threatening stuff that, understandably, she really hates.”
Steve-O might be in no mood to settle down. But there is plenty in his book to suggest that Knoxville is right: there has been so much growth. For instance, Steve-O now looks back at Jackass and accurately pinpoints its true charm: “It was devoid of any mean spirit. There was nothing bigoted or misogynistic. I consider it rather wholesome.” He also risks alienating some of his fanbase by discussing his vote for Joe Biden: “I would sooner have less in my bank account and live in a world that is safer and more dignified for all of its inhabitants.”
There’s an unexpectedly sweet ending to the interview when I wish him well with his book. “Thank you, man,” he says. “It’s a big deal to ask someone to read a book. It’s a humongous thing, especially in this day and age. It’s a tall order. So for you to have done that? I just want you to know what a tremendous gift that is to me, for you to have devoted that much attention to my book. I can’t thank you enough, I’m over the moon and I just want you to know how grateful I am.”
I think he really means it, too. Which, coming from someone who once tightrope-walked over an alligator pit with raw meat stuffed into his underwear, means a lot.
• A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions will be published on 27 September.
