Johnny Knoxville

In the mid-1990s, Philip John Clapp strapped on a cheap bulletproof vest, loaded a 38-caliber revolver and shot himself in the chest in front of a video camera. The stunt was part of an article for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother.

That homemade tape didn't just prove the vest stopped the bullet. It sold thousands of VHS copies and laid the groundwork for a character the world would come to know as Johnny Knoxville.

Born in Tennessee in 1971, he moved to Los Angeles intending to become a dramatic actor. He filmed fast-food commercials, worked as an uncredited extra and endured frustrating auditions, all while ghostwriting copy to make ends meet. But when he discovered that audiences would pay to watch a self-destructive guy smile after getting an electric shock, he shelved his classical theater monologues.

The Rejection of Lorne Michaels

In 2000, MTV bought the idea Knoxville had developed with director Spike Jonze and editor Jeff Tremaine. Shortly before signing the contract, Lorne Michaels offered him a permanent spot on Saturday Night Live. It was every comedian's dream in the United States, but it meant submitting to the scrutiny of NBC's writers.

Knoxville said no.

He preferred the chaos of a half-hour weekly slot on a cable music channel. The show Jackass debuted in October 2000 to huge ratings and an immediate flood of complaints from the U.S. Senate. Senators such as Joe Lieberman accused the crew of corrupting young people, because kids were copying their stunts on school playgrounds.

MTV canceled the format after three short seasons due to political pressure. But the commercial machine was already running, and the leap to movie theaters in 2002 multiplied the earnings in a wild way.

The first film cost just $5 million and earned more than $79 million at the global box office. So Hollywood learned to tolerate other people's pain as long as the books balanced.

Studio Lights and Broken Bones

Among the group's films, Knoxville tried to break into conventional fiction. He worked under John Waters in A Dirty Shame in 2004 and shared the marquee with Seann William Scott in the adaptation of The Dukes of Hazzard in 2005. None of those productions won over serious critics.

He didn't seem to mind much, either.

His biggest stumble on the big screen came with Action Point in 2018. He wanted to recreate an amusement park without safety measures by filming the risky stunts live. The shoot was a medical nightmare that left him with a fractured eye socket and several broken teeth. The film barely grossed more than $5 million on a $19 million budget.

And the physical toll kept rising with every decade that passed.

In 2007, he suffered a urethral rupture attempting a stunt on a motocross bike, which forced him to use a medical catheter for three years. Add to that a list of sixteen diagnosed concussions accumulated over two decades of falls, firecrackers and run-ins with wild animals.

The Last Collision with the Bull

For the shoot of Jackass Forever in 2020, Knoxville insisted on standing in front of a fighting bull dressed as a magician on a California ranch. The animal launched him into the air four meters high, and he landed headfirst in the sand.

The medical report confirmed a brain hemorrhage, a broken wrist, broken ribs and cognitive after-effects that required months of neurological therapy.

Despite the troubled shoot, the film hit theaters in 2022 and topped the North American box office on its opening weekend, beating big-budget productions that cost ten times as much.

That same year, 2022, he competed in the WrestleMania 38 ring against wrestler Sami Zayn in Texas, settling the match with mousetraps and a giant mechanical hand. On television, he starred in the sitcom Reboot, created by Steven Levitan for Hulu, but the streaming service canceled the series in early 2023 after a single run of eight episodes.

Dickhouse Productions, founded by Knoxville and his partners at the start of the century, keeps its operational offices in Los Angeles while managing international distribution rights to the entire video archive accumulated since 2000.