If Steve-O hadn't listened to a certain voice inside his head,
he might not be around anymore. From addiction to grievous injuries to untimely deaths,
these are the heartbreaking stories of the Jackass cast.
Ryan Dunn was a performer without fear or modesty,
and many of his Jackass segments are the stuff of legends. That includes one featured in Jackass:
The Movie that involved a toy car, a certain bodily orifice,
and a trip to the hospital to surprise an unwitting doctor with a very unusual X-ray.
Unfortunately, Dunn's propensity for daredevilry caught up with him in the
most tragic way possible. In 2011, he wrapped up a night of drinking with his buddy Zachary
Hartwell by getting in his Porsche 911 GT3 and then heading home at speeds that may have
reached 140 miles per hour. Dunn lost control of the vehicle, which crashed and exploded into a
fireball. He and Hartwell both died at the scene from blunt force and thermal trauma.
The tragedy left Dunn's castmates completely devastated. They eventually paid tribute to
him with a sweet memorial at the end of 2022's Jackass Forever.
"We've gotten away with, like, so much life-threatening, crazy stuff,
you just can't imagine us actually not surviving something."
Although he's perhaps the most outwardly genial of the Jackass bunch, Dave England
is no shrinking violet, as he's pulled off an amazing number of very dangerous stunts on camera.
He's always been a special kind of fearless, and before Jackass even existed,
that tendency cost him a small, but very tender and valuable body part.
England's first passion was snowboarding, and he experienced an extremely gnarly
injury in New Zealand in 1997. As he revealed on Chris Raab's Bathroom Break podcast in 2019,
"I fell into rocks and cracked my kidney and spleen [...] My guts were popping out,
and I was pushing them back in."
The injury was ultimately classified as a double hernia. England then made the
fateful decision to fly home to Oregon for surgery. Upon awakening from the procedure,
he was told that one of his testicles had to be removed due to the severity of the injury.
"It's kept me really high and tight, you know. I'll tell you that."
"Danger" Ehren McGhehey didn't earn his nickname for nothing. In a 2022 interview with GQ,
he waxed philosophical about some of his wildest stunts, and he had a lot to choose
from. From the thoroughly painful, like taking softballs and pogo sticks to his private parts,
to the objectively terrifying, like being strapped to a chair and slathered in honey before a bear
enters the room, his stunts often seem designed to elicit the strongest possible reaction out of him.
In June 2021, McGhehey stopped by Steve-O's Wild Ride! podcast, and the two had a heart-to-heart
about McGhehey feeling bullied by some of his castmates. Steve-O noted that over the years
McGhehey had become a butt of everyone's jokes, and McGhehey agreed, explaining:
"It's all in good fun, or so everyone says. But the reality is, is no matter what,
eventually you just get tired of the same repetitive jokes."
McGhehey theorized that since he just sort of fell into this role early,
other castmates felt compelled to go along with it, or they’d end up
becoming the fall guy themselves. On the plus side, he also feels that this
has made him more relatable to many of the Jackass fans he encounters.
Among the endearing new crew members introduced in Jackass Forever was Sean McInerney,
who goes by the nickname "Poopies." You might be wondering how he earned himself such a
juvenile moniker. The answer is about as wild as you'd expect from someone on the Jackass crew.
As Poopies revealed to Stab Magazine in 2016,
he was hanging out with friends watching Jackass one night while in junior high.
He was then goaded into donning a gorilla mask and doing his business in the middle of the busiest
intersection in Carlsbad, California, where he had recently moved from Missouri. He complied,
the cops showed up, he was arrested, and the rest is history. As he lamented,
"All through high school I never had a girlfriend, never went to prom, never did anything with a
chick because my name was Poopies. I thought man, I moved to Carlsbad, met these surfer kids and now
they’re ruining my life. But I kept surfing and going to the same beach, kept putting in time to
be one of the boys and that’s all that it comes down to. Just wanting to be one of the boys."
Another budding prankster who made her debut in Jackass Forever is comedian Rachel Wolfson. She
proved to be a natural fit, as she took part in a standout bit wherein she allowed herself to
receive an unconventional "botox treatment" by way of exposure to a live scorpion.
"Alright I mean, you seem fine. I don't see any
scorpion marks." "I'm fine now."
Wolfson is also a podcaster and a passionate advocate of the benefits
of marijuana. This particular drug presented itself as an alternative to
the pharmaceuticals she'd basically been forced to consume for her entire life.
In a 2019 interview with Forbes, Wolfson revealed that she was diagnosed with ADHD at the tender age
of five. She was then prescribed Adderall and Ritalin. At age 12, she was further diagnosed
with bipolar disorder, which prompted her parents to add lithium to her regimen. As she explained,
"For as long as I could remember, the pills never made me feel right. I was
supposed to be taking something to make me feel better but it only made me feel worse."
Ultimately for Wolfson, only cannabis made any difference. As she put it,
"I immediately remember liking the way it made me
feel, but I also felt some shame behind it because it was illegal."
These days, Wolfson devotes a good portion of her
time to extolling the virtues of weed as a therapeutic substance.
Chris Raab has always been game for the kind of dangerous stunts that left him
with a reputation as a complete maniac, even among his castmates.
Of course, with dangerous stunts comes plenty of injuries,
and with plenty of injuries comes the need to treat chronic pain. For Raab,
the solution was prescription painkillers and alcohol, and lots of them.
In a 2018 Page Six article about the Jackass crew, Raab revealed that jostling for screen
time with his fellow cast members resulted in a willingness to take on more and more danger. The
resulting mishaps then left him with addictions to painkillers and alcohol. As he explained,
"If you got hurt, you were like, 'Oh, I can just take a pill for that.'"
And he did get hurt, early and often. At a certain point,
everybody's various addictions had them turning on each other, and the brutal cycle
of injury and self-medication prompted Raab to withdraw from Jackass after the first movie.
Unfortunately, the fleeting nature of Raab's fame led to depression,
which led to more self-medication, which led to him eventually even contemplating suicide.
Fortunately, though, at the time of the interview, he was more than eight years sober,
working a regular job, and toiling for a non-profit organization alongside his wife.
The Jackass crew has a bit of a history of climbing into the ring with professional
wrestlers. In 2006, for example, Steve-O and Chris Pontius teamed up against the
frighteningly large grappler Umaga, which didn't exactly transpire as planned.
Steve-O annoyed Umaga by cracking up the entire time that he was getting
manhandled. This led to Umaga deviating from the approved routine by kicking
Steve-O in the back of the head and executing a few choice moves. This
left Steve-O in bad enough shape that he didn't even remember parts of the match.
"I don't care if people say it's fake. It was
not fake. We got our a**** kicked" "It was not fucking fake."
Despite all this, a plan was put in place to have Johnny Knoxville and a few of the boys
take on Umaga once again at SummerSlam 2007. But Knoxville pulled the plug,
for a pretty understandable reason.
In June of that year, WWE star Chris Benoit committed suicide after killing his own wife and
child. He'd previously struggled with brain damage and depression stemming from his wrestling career.
This tragic incident was enough to prompt the Jackass contingent to back out of the event,
although their relationship with the WWE has remained cordial. Knoxville did eventually
appear in a sanctioned WWE event in 2022, fifteen years after his planned debut.
As you might imagine, the stars of Jackass are by and large no strangers to drink and drugs,
and Steve-O is one of the most notorious in this regard.
In 2008, it was reported that his increasingly erratic behavior had prompted his buddies to check
him in for a stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. What was originally meant to be a
72-hour mental health hold turned into a two-week stay. As Steve-O wrote in an email at that time,
"I've figured out that I did a great deal of damage to my brain by abusing drugs,
and now that they've all worn off, I'm facing the consequences."
Steve-O thankfully utilized his institutionalization as a springboard
to getting sober and addressing his mental health issues. In a 2016 interview with NME,
he revealed that the depth of his struggle was slightly more harrowing than previously reported.
He described one incident during which he heard voices that were imploring him to stop
using drugs. When he failed to listen, he actually hallucinated his own intervention. As he recalled,
"People [were] filing in and sitting down, and the fact was I was completely alone the whole time."
Fortunately, Steve-O listened to what his hallucinations were telling him,
and he's been sober ever since his lockup.
"Recovery starts with an admission of complete defeat."
Bam Margera has always been beloved among the Jackass faithful for his charisma,
deadpan humor, and willingness to do pretty much anything for a laugh.
His popularity among viewers led to the spin-off Viva La Bam,
which ran for five seasons, and the miniseries Bam's Unholy Union,
which detailed his impending marriage to his then-girlfriend Missy. But throughout
his rise to fame, Margera has grappled with a constant, unwanted companion: alcoholism.
One major public sign of trouble happened in 2009,
when Margera was hospitalized for severe dehydration after a four-day drinking spree.
The problem only got worse after Ryan Dunn's death
in 2011. During a 2016 appearance on VH1's Family Therapy with Dr. Jenn,
he described how the loss of his best friend affected him profoundly, as he admitted,
"’What do you do now?' Well, I went on a drinking bender."
Margera was in and out of rehab for most of that decade, most recently completing a year-long stint
in 2022 after being unceremoniously dumped from Jackass Forever. Steve-O appeared on
Sirius XM's Faction Talk later that year to provide a bittersweet update, as he revealed,
"[Bam] sounded super drunk, but he was in good spirits."
“Jackass was everything to me."
An old friend of Bam Margera, Brandon Novak has made appearances on Viva La Bam and some of the
Jackass movies. In a 2017 blog post on the website of author and speaker Ryan Hampton,
Novak described his childhood in harrowing terms.
This included a crack-addicted father who pushed him into helping him sell drugs, an addiction to
heroin that began when he was still young, and the first of many rehab stints when he was a teenager.
Then as a young man, despite his involvement in pro skateboarding and his association with
CKY and Jackass, Novak ended up unhoused with a single pair of clothes. He was
even forced into sex work to meet the demands of his heavy substance use.
Countless trips to rehab failed to make a dent in his addiction, until 2015,
when he finally kicked heroin for good. He came out the other side with an eloquent warning for
those in the process of falling into hard drug use, as he wrote in his blog post,
"Addiction's like a funhouse mirror in some kind of nightmare carnival ride."
Novak channeled his experiences into his memoir Dreamseller and the graphic novel
The Brandon Novak Chronicles. As he summed up his life on the blog post,
"It's skate, drugs, and rock 'n roll — and I lived to tell the tale."
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).