Your bag is empty.
Steve-O answers the back door of his Tennessee ranch in Mossy Oak camo boxers and immediately escorts me to his bedroom. It is 11 a.m. He has just woken up, doesn’t have his teeth in yet, and the first thing he wants to show me is the blackout shades. The second is a medication he takes for an esophageal condition, caused partly by years of vomiting on command. The third is a home gym decorated with murals of his rescue animals working out, where he settles into an elaborate stretching routine.
On 44 acres in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Steve-O has built what he calls the Radical Ranch: goats, rescued cats, a pig, a dog named Wendy, and, inside a red barn, a half-pipe. It is a quiet place for a man who spent much of the 2000s trying to injure himself for a living.
When Jackass premiered on MTV in 2000, Steve-O, born Stephen Glover, was a clown-school stuntman with a stack of tapes and almost no money. He would become one of the breakout stars of the franchise, building a career out of setting himself on fire, stapling parts of himself to other parts of himself, and volunteering for things most people would spend their lives avoiding. Fame hit fast, followed by money, addiction, and a long stretch when it seemed entirely possible that Steve-O might not outlive his act. Sobriety gave Steve-O a second life, or maybe a third or fourth. Here on the ranch, at 52, he’s figuring out what to do with it next.
The occasion for our conversation is Jackass: Best and Last, the franchise’s final send-off.
How did you find skateboarding?
Oh my God, skateboarding is so important, man. I didn’t know anything about skateboarding until I saw the first Back to the Future in theaters in 1985. You got Michael J. Fox holding onto the back of the car on the skateboard, and that was the coolest thing ever. I knew I had seen a skateboard, so I walked out of that movie theater and went to it. Started riding it. And then that Christmas, like everybody else in the world, I got a skateboard.
At what point did the camera become part of that?
We’re gonna die. We’re barreling towards this demise, which we fucking fear more than anything. The whole human experience, as I see it, is an exercise in wrapping your head around your mortality.
We’ve got three major ways to do that. Number one is reproduce, so that we’re not really dead, because our kids live on. Number two is religion, because it promises everything’s gonna be OK: You’re gonna go to heaven. You don’t have to worry about being dead. And then the third bucket is leave some fucking lasting legacy of your life. You had stick figures drawn in caves, because people are like, “I’ll be dead, but this fucking stick figure is gonna be here.”
So I looked at the video camera as my ticket to immortality. It wasn’t about having a career. I thought I would be dead as fuck. I didn’t think I’d live to be 30, so I was hustling to document the most fucked-up shit I could. In my view, once I was dead, if one person was watching one videotape, then I would still be alive. It was like my religion.
The only guy going to Clown College to seek legitimacy.
That impulse to film everything eventually put you on Big Brother’s radar—the cult skate magazine that would later help incubate Jackass. You burned your face doing a fire-breathing backflip for them, then somehow wound up at Clown College. How did that all connect?
I had already applied to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College before that incident, when I burned all the skin off half my face and got my first real national magazine coverage. It was while I was still peeling my face off my pillow each morning, with pus oozing out of the burns, that I got the phone call saying I’d been accepted into Clown College. And I was like, “Fuck, how am I going to put greasepaint on burns?” But I heal so crazy fast that I healed up and went off to Clown College. And while I was there, that magazine came out. The fact that I was a clown endeared me to the fucking people who started Jackass. It was organic.
Did the other clowns look at you askance? Like you weren’t a serious clown coming from skate culture?
There was a little bit of that. The bigger problem was that I was such a fucking alcoholic drug addict.
The only reason I even thought to go to Clown College was to further my goal of becoming a crazy-famous stuntman. I had been homeless for three years, got zero fucking traction, and I thought, all right, if I can graduate from Ringling Bros. Clown College, then I’m a trained circus professional. People take me more seriously as a stuntman. The only guy going to Clown College to seek legitimacy.
What happens after Clown College?
I went back to fucking selling drugs. Not for too long, because I started getting gigs as a clown. First in nightclubs, dressing up as a clown and being a drunk, fire-breathing acrobat. That led to cruise ships. I did a six-month contract and got fired. Then a flea market hired me as a clown at the flea-market circus. My last day in that circus was my first day filming Jackass.
Talk about the first moment after Jackass aired where you were noticed on the street.
When Jackass came out on MTV, the first thing I did that was really impactful was swallowing a goldfish and barfing it up into a fishbowl. As soon as that aired, my life was black-and-white, completely different overnight. Back then, the media was not so fragmented. You couldn’t watch video on the internet. There was no social media. Jackass was such a ratings hit for MTV, and a fucking lot of people watched me barf that goldfish into the fishbowl.
It’s comical how little I was paid for the first season of Jackass. I didn’t even get paid per episode. I got paid per bit. After five days of filming, I was all banged up, hungover, had been bitten by a shark, and I pulled out a piece of paper to write down what I felt really needed to be on the show. At the top I wrote “Goldfish,” and I thought, while I’m at it, I might as well put what I expect to be paid. Next to “Goldfish,” I literally wrote $200. Which is hilarious, because I could have totally choked on the goldfish. If it went down backwards somehow, I would have completely torn up my throat. But I had so much pride, and I wanted to be considered so gnarly. It was purely pride and ego. I wrote $200. I got bitten by a shark—you can see this little scar right there on my finger—and I charged $500 for that.
A $500 bite.
Yep. When it was all said and done, after taxes, I was paid less than $1,500 for the entire first season of Jackass. Before the show came out, my sister kicked me out of the house. I was broke, unemployed, and homeless, and a star on this big MTV show. That’s one of the first things I learned about fame: It comes a lot easier than fortune.
Did you guys figure out what MTV would go with and what they wouldn’t run?
When I found out the pilot was ordered to series—maybe that’s when I found out MTV actually bought the whole first season—I was told to pack up all my best footage and send it in so they could acquire it, license it, put it right on the show. I was all stoked. Like, “Oh, killer.” I put together my best stuff and sent it in, and they told me not one clip I sent was allowed on television, mostly because I had a personal rule that whatever you do, it’s way cooler if you’re on fire while you do it. MTV was super touchy about fire because they’d had all this heat over Beavis and Butt-Head and kids playing with fire. MTV had no sense of humor about fire, which ruled out a ton of stuff that I did. There was other shit too. They were also touchy about jumping off anything too high. If I wasn’t jumping off high shit on fire, that meant I was doing something really fucked-up they definitely wouldn’t show.
I had a personal rule that whatever you do, it’s way cooler if you’re on fire while you do it.
So they basically made you get weirder.
Right. Out of the gate, my concern was, well, they won’t show any of my best stuff. What will they show? To our credit, we got super agile and nimble at it. We were like Mission: Impossible, getting around the lasers with all their fucking rules, finding ways to get fucked-up shit on there. One thing I love so much was red herrings. Once we put together the episode, we’d submit it to MTV Standards and Practices. They’d watch it down and give back notes saying what wasn’t allowed in the cut.
You would throw in stuff you knew was dead on arrival.
We would deliberately film shit we knew was so far beyond the pale. When we submitted the episode loaded with all the extra fucked-up shit, we would give them all kinds of no-brainers to cut, so the stuff on the line had a better chance of getting in.
Remember any of that stuff?
Oh yeah. There were notes that came back from Standards and Practices. One of my favorites was: Remove the two polar bears. Two of us were wearing fucking big animal mascot costumes of polar bears with holes cut out where our dicks were, literally getting blow jobs from Russian hookers. I’m so proud that MTV’s budget was paid to Russian hookers to suck our dicks on footage, so Standards and Practices would have something to cut out. Amazing.
What makes the perfect Jackass stunt?
I mean, I don’t know that there is a perfect Jackass stunt. Jackass is a very multidimensional thing. There’s different lanes. There’s super gnarly, dangerous. There’s super-gross barf. There’s purely funny fucking comedy. There’s utterly fucking ridiculous, like what’s the point? For a Jackass show or movie, you can’t stay in one lane. You gotta switch to another one. You gotta change it up. And you gotta not get too gross too soon. On the TV show, they would put whatever the grossest thing was dead last, because the concern was that as soon as the female viewership saw shit or barf, they were out. You were going to kill your Nielsen ratings, which came in on Tuesday.
So shit and barf last.
Yeah. Shit and barf last.
Can you walk us through the marching band on the treadmill? [In Jackass Forever, Steve-O and four others, dressed in band uniforms and carrying instruments, march in line onto a massive, high-speed treadmill.] At what point did you realize it was more dangerous than it seemed?
When I woke up. That treadmill, I believe, was designed for horses. And, God, what a big, rad visual fucking thing. It’s epic. They were trying to figure out what speed to do it on, and I think they had actual physical dummies they plopped on it. They were like, “That’s too fast.” They kept bumping down the speed. And then we had bumped it down enough, we were like, “Oh yeah, we’re good.” And we did the marching band.
I remember it was not easy to bring yourself to do that, were it not for the fact that five of us were doing it together at once. There are certain things that are not easy to do. It just becomes time to do them. I didn’t expect to be knocked completely out cold, and I didn’t love that I was knocked out cold, because that’s typically not good. But if there was a moment to be knocked unconscious, that was the one. You want to save those tickets and play them strategically.
In the stuff you made after Jackass, what was the hardest stunt to figure out mechanically?
Man, jacking off to completion while butt naked and having another man strapped to my back, to time my ejaculation with falling out of an airplane, skydiving for my first time ever. I called the stunt Skyjacking. There were so many layers to that. Finding the company willing to let me jack off and blow a load in their airplane under their business banner. Then finding the individual tandem skydive instructor willing to be strapped to my back while I was doing it.
You needed a really progressive skydiving instructor.
Right. And then just the logistics of being in an airplane full of dudes with another man strapped to my back and actually getting the job done. The way a drop zone works, the plane has to be in a very distinct spot over the drop zone. There’s a light inside the airplane, and green means good to jump out, but it’s only on for, like, one or two minutes at a time, so I had to time blowing a load within the fucking two minutes.
Did you have chemical assistance for that one?
No chemical assistance, but I brought a portable DVD player in the airplane, and that’s the only time I’ve watched actual porno in over 10 years. That was it. It was for work.
Where do you go from there? That seems like escalation to a point where it’s hard to pivot from.
Well, right? I felt very painted into a corner.
There’s a light inside the airplane, and green means good to jump out, but it’s only on for, like, one or two minutes at a time, so I had to time blowing a load within the fucking two minutes.
This final Jackass film arrives in a climate where we see so much fake stuff every day. I was thinking pain is not something you can fake.
Oh, I think you can fake fucking whatever you want. We just have enough legacy and integrity that people know. I’ve always thought once you fake one fucking thing, everything you’ve ever done comes into question. When I went to launch my YouTube channel in 2013, I was blessed to have some of the biggest people in the YouTube prank space want to help me. We’re collaborating on pranks, devising the plan, and these guys were like, “Oh well, we can just fucking fake it.” And I was like, “What? What the fuck are you talking about? Fake something?” They’re like, “Yeah, we just fucking set it up so someone pretends—” And I was like, “Dude, if I fake one fucking thing, everything I’ve ever done comes into question. It’s not gonna fucking happen.” I was so deeply offended. So I don’t think anybody’s questioning our integrity with Jackass.
This movie arrives in a moment with a lot of online discourse about masculinity culture that’s isolated, angry, hyper-competitive—
Misogynistic.
Misogynistic. Jackass might have had some of that competitiveness, but it’s also joyful. I wonder if people are nostalgic for that idea of male friendship.
I don’t even think whatever is going on with fucking current times applies. Jackass is pretty immune to demographics, to cultural moments. If I had a theory about why Jackass was successful and endured as long as it has, number one, it’s because it’s wholesome, which I know is counterintuitive, given how fucked-up the shit we do to each other and ourselves is. But we are, at our core, attention whores who want screen time, so we want these terrible things to happen to us, which makes it permissible for the audience to enjoy watching it. Beyond what we do to ourselves and each other, there’s nothing mean-spirited. Nothing hateful. It’s designed genuinely for joy with respect. And that makes it wholesome.
Then there’s the wrinkle that everybody wants to look at carnage, which is why there’s a traffic jam whenever you have an accident, because everybody’s slowing down to look. So it follows that we found success by deliberately manufacturing accidents and carnage for people to ogle.
You want the eyeballs.
Yeah. And then there’s another dimension, which was that we were able to not take ourselves seriously while being presented in compromising, sort of uncool situations. I think for the people who tried to emulate it, what tripped them up was doing it while trying to take themselves seriously, which doesn’t work. So I think our willingness to look uncool is endearing. Our manufacturing of accidents and carnage is compelling. And our wholesomeness makes enjoying it permissible.
Does it truly feel like the end of Jackass?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. One hundred percent it’s the end. Really, the end of Jackass was when [Johnny] Knoxville got hit by that bull in the last movie [Jackass Forever, 2022]. That was the fucking final hit for Knoxville’s head. Had to be. If Knoxville is no longer willing to get hit in the head, you really can’t do Jackass. What made this movie happen was this lump sum of footage that had never been allowed to be shown anywhere. I genuinely don’t know why it’s allowed now, but it’s in there. That’s what this movie is: finding a home for such fucked-up shit that never had a home, and one last hurrah of all of us getting together and doing whatever we have in us to do. I had my own little private screening in the edit bay last week, and I was beyond moved. Like, wow. What I was a part of. What I am a part of. Fucking insane.
At what point does the switch flip where you’re like, “Oh, I actually do want to survive”?
It was like after Jackass came out, and like, all right, now I’m kind of successful. Still, I did not think I was going to live very long at all, because I was in such deep shit with drugs and alcohol, and just my whole life. I didn’t see any longevity in the way I was living. So I wasn’t particularly concerned about being smart with money or savvy in business or anything. I was just not going to be around. I thought, like, I’m going to be fucking dead.
And then in 2008 I got clean and sober, and that shocked my system in the biggest way. All of a sudden I’m not killing myself with drugs and alcohol anymore, and I’m taking care of myself, which means I was confronted with the idea that I might live for many more decades. Holy shit. I’m 33 and now I’m actually being careful about my health and wellness. I might be less than fucking halfway through my life at 33. That was the scariest thing to me.
Especially because at that point, when I got clean and sober, I had burned every bridge in my career. Jackass wasn’t happening. No opportunities to make money. I didn’t know what my earnings potential would be, because everything I heard about recovery and sobriety was about deflate your ego, live a spiritual life. How the fuck am I supposed to do that and be Steve-O? I thought, Jesus, my whole career as Steve-O, the Jackass guy, maybe isn’t even fucking viable anymore.
It’s based on having eyeballs on you.
Right. How do you deflate the ego and be a professional attention whore? I knew that my life depended on me making recovery the biggest priority, the only priority, and I was like, “Fuck, maybe I just don’t have a career anymore.” On top of that, this was 2008, so the financial crisis came and wiped out at least half of what I had saved, which wasn’t that much. All of a sudden, it was like, “Shit, now I gotta really think about how I’m gonna eat.”
It was almost like I traded my obsession for drugs and alcohol with my obsession for earning and setting myself up for the future. I think I pushed that pretty hard. I’m really glad I did. And now I’m in a pretty good spot, and I’ve got a pretty short list of people who I’m determined are gonna be fucking fine. I’ve worked hard enough that now I’m gonna take care of my people, and I’m gonna take care of all kinds of animals.
So we can spend a minute on the 2010s. You mentioned getting sober in 2008. At some point after that, did you trade an addiction to drugs and alcohol for a sex addiction? Or do you see it as a trade?
It was always there. My approach to sex was particularly unhealthy from my first experience, just in that I was careless with somebody’s feelings. When I lost my virginity, I was super into it, but after the act, somehow a light switch flipped. All of a sudden I completely lost interest. That became a pattern. I would pour on the charm and get a woman super invested in me, and then I would just—
Disappear.
Ghost. And that’s such a fucking shitty way to treat people, man. We’re supposed to treat people the way we want to be treated, and what I was doing was treating people the way I most fear being treated. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to get that I have fear of rejection and abandonment.
Abandon them before they can walk away from you.
Yeah. How fucked-up is that? I worked it out in all my recovery shit, this pattern where I would meet a woman, and even though I wouldn’t realize I was doing it, it started with misleading her to believe there was something real going on. Then misleading is followed by exploiting her, to act out sexually. After that I totally lose interest, and I begin to withdraw and neglect her. If neglecting and withdrawing doesn’t do the trick, then I just gotta all-out abandon. Mislead. Exploit. Neglect. Abandon. Repeat.
It’s using people like a fucking substance, throwing them away and having no regard for their feelings. That made me feel like such an absolute piece of shit every fucking time, and I would do it over and over again. As I got older, I thought this isn’t the path to real happiness. What am I gonna be, in my 50s and just trying to hump everything that moves? That doesn’t feel like where I want to be. I subscribed to the idea that future happiness was dependent on learning how to have a healthy relationship, and so I made that a goal. The first step was to swear off promiscuous encounters, swear off acting out sexually entirely. And I couldn’t do it. I just fucking couldn’t.
The entire year of 2014, I did not ejaculate.
So I ended up getting into therapy with a guy who specialized in sexual stuff, and this guy was like, “Dude, you need to go to fucking sex addict rehab.” I did that, and when I got out, I had all these tour dates on my schedule, and I’m like, “I don’t stand a fucking chance.” So I enlisted somebody to travel with me as a sober companion, literally a professional cock blocker.
After sex addict rehab, they recommended a period of celibacy, maybe 30 to 90 days or something. And I was like, “Well, they recommend 30 to 90 days. I’m fucking”—you know, I ended up going 431 days without blowing a load at all. The entire year of 2014, I did not ejaculate.
And somehow—like, not somehow, obviously—that was the most fucking productive year ever. I think I began 2014 with maybe 1 million Facebook followers. I ended 2014 with 8 million, because in 2013 I learned how to edit, started a YouTube channel. I took control of my own career because I could create my own content and just fucking put it out there on my own, and that brought about a rebirth in my career and my livelihood. That was fucking awesome, man.
Earlier you talked about the camera as your ticket to immortality. Did anyone ever call bullshit on that?
There’s this point in Clown College—I love this story, too, man. There were 33 clowns who got into Clown College in my year, and they had all of us living in this one apartment complex, along with maybe six marine biology students. The whole thing was for two months. One weekend after we put up a show, I’m getting all hammered with one of the marine biology students, this girl, and I’m telling her we’re all gonna be dead, dead. But you know what? When we’re all dead, I’m gonna still be alive, because I’ve got all this rad footage that’s gonna keep me alive forever.
She looked at me and shook her head. She said, “You’re fucking pathetic.” Something like that. She said, “You think it’s all about you.” She said, “How about this? If I do my job, follow my calling, every time a marine mammal nibbles on a reef that I helped to preserve, then I’m still alive. I live forever. You’re so fucking wrapped up in your fucking—” And I remember thinking, even then, as drunk as I was, like, “Ohh. Ohh. I have certainly been wildly self-absorbed in all of my pursuits.” And I’ll never forget that marine biology student, and the idea that we can have legacy that’s not so fucking self-centered. As I’ve grown older and evolved, I like to align myself a little bit more with that ethos.
Which brings us to the Radical Ranch. Tell us about it. We’re in Tennessee. How long have you been here? What was the idea?
Yeah, I bought my property in Tennessee in September 2023. The idea was that I wanted to have a bunch of land and open up my own animal sanctuary, and that’s precisely what I’ve done. It’s really going back to my whole mortality complex, and this fucking cruel prank that our existence is, plus the whole dynamic with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and wealth disparity being so disgusting. I never had it in me to want to create a person to struggle in this fucking world, so I never wanted to have kids. I just wanted to pour myself into helping animals and make that my deal.
If I can facilitate encounters where people interact with an animal and see in its eyes that it has feelings, maybe they’ll ask themselves, “Why would I contribute to harming this fucking thing?” That’s what this place is about.
It’s really weird to say, and I’ve never said it before, but I think I’m at a point where I’m pretty comfortable not seeking attention.
You’ve said the internet has gotten meaner and that you’ve had to unplug from it. You’ve also talked a lot about attention and addiction being similar. Can you imagine a version of your life where you genuinely don’t need all those eyeballs on you?
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It’s really weird to say, and I’ve never said it before, but I think I’m at a point where I’m pretty comfortable not seeking attention. This is wild. But yeah. I’ve put in my work. I’ve got myself in a place where I can take care of the people I want to take care of. I can take on a bunch of fucking animals and help them. And if I could be maybe semi-retired at this point, and only work because I fucking want to, not because I have to, then that’s a win for me.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
