Steve-O's Wild Ride! - Podcast
Jackass has proven itself to be one of the most popular and successful franchises that millennials grew up with. Johnny Knoxville was a co-founder of Jackass along with Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine, and together they went on to launch the MTV show and film franchise that’s brought on over $500 million worldwide.
Knoxville recently sat down Jackass co-star Steve-O for Steve-O’s podcast. They talked about how Knoxville’s past with drug use but they also discussed how Johnny nearly aborted Jackass before the launch after getting an offer from SNL but instead he opted to bet on himself and the rest was history. The story’s bookended between an ad on Steve-O‘s podcast so here’s the first portion but I’ve written out the whole story below:
Johnny Knoxville On Turning Down SNL To Launch Jackass
Johnny Knoxville: “Right as we were getting ready to go make the (Jackass) pilot.. Because the deal took forever… It took over a year for the deal to get done. But right at the 11th hour I got the offer from Saturday Night Live.”
“So I go to the Beverly Hills Hotel and met Lorne Michaels in the Polo Lounge which incidentally is where Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas started out, Hunter S. Thompson’s novel. So that’s another connection to Hunter.”
“And I was going to get 5 minutes on the show to do a stunt or a prank every week. And for a guy who was waiting tables and suddenly I got this pilot that I’m about to shoot and then Saturday Night Live wants me to do something… It was a lot.”
“Because like… Everything could fail. I could make the wrong decision. But I just thought ‘God, I’m going to bet on myself and my friends because on SNL… I would have been lucky to be on SNL but I wouldn’t have any control, you know?”
“And Jackass is big on tone and if I’m not controlling the tone along with Jeff and Spike it’s… I don’t know, I just bet on myself. And it could have been a big failure. I know we tried our best… (to fail)… But it succeeded.”
Steve-O: “It’s really interesting because I know a lot of people would have no idea that Saturday Night Live offered that to you… And what it would’ve looked like. It would have felt kind of like a nonsequitor maybe. You know? Something that didn’t quite fit in with everything else.”
This isn’t the first time Johnny Knoxville has told the story of turning down SNL to pursue Jackass. But it’s still a pretty unknown yet key piece to the Jackass origin story.