Twenty broken bones. Sixteen concussions. One hell of a story.
Two decades after Jackass first premiered on MTV and 12 years since the last movie, Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and some of the other members of the team are finally back in action in Jackass Forever, proving you are never too told to be, well, a jackass. But that doesn't mean it's getting any easier for the stars, with Steve-O admitting on his YouTube channel that he made more visits to the hospital while filming the fourth movie than the rest of the films in the franchise combined. In fact, both he and Knoxville ended up in the E.R. during the first week of production.
That initial injury Knoxville suffered actually caused the stuntman to call off some of the movie's most dangerous acts. "Those were big, and could end as badly," the 50-year-old co-creator told Variety. "Or worse. I've done enough. I don't have anything to prove. I have kids to raise. That's the most important thing."
Hey, if anyone has earned the right to take it easy it's Knoxville, who has suffered more than a dozen concussions during his 22-year tenure as head Jackass. But he is far from the only team member to need medical attention over the years.
So brace yourself as we look back on some of the Jackass crew's most serious injuries, including several that occurred while filming the most recent installment:
Jackass' co-creator and most recognizable star has also suffered the show's most serious injuries, including a brain hemorrhage while filming Jackass Forever that saw a bull run the 50-year-old over after he tried to do a magic trick.
In addition to the brain injury, Knoxville revealed to Variety, he also suffered a broken wrist, broken rib and a concussion, with director Jeff Tremaine recalling, "He was snoring for three or four minutes. It was gnarly."
Knoxville continued to see a neurologist after checking out of the hospital, explaining, "My cognitive skills took a couple of months to come back. I was walking and talking and carrying on a conversation, but I wasn't 100 percent for three months. I couldn't sit still. I couldn't focus on anything, which is a problem usually, but it was really a problem. I was like a butterfly, flying around."
Knoxville's encounter with the bull wasn't the first time the stuntman landed in the E.R.
In the series' original run, he broke his ankle when he tried to roller jump over the L.A. river. He suffered a concussion and required stitches after a department store boxing match with heavyweight fighter Butterbean while filming Jackass: The Movie.
In the second film, the Bad Grandpa star ended up with a torn urethra after attempting to do a backflip on a motorbike.
"I have to live with all my past injuries. I've had, like, 16 concussions—I'm not very in touch with my body," he said on Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes' Smartless podcast. "And I figured I did this to myself, right?"
Despite his various injuries, Knoxville continued, "I'm so lucky I've had some stunts that almost had forever consequences five or six times. I'm almost dead five or six times."
When asked by MJ4 how many bones he's broken while filming Jackass, Steve-O responded, "If you count teeth, well into the 20s."
The 47-year-old is known for partaking in some of the franchise's most outrageous stunts, which often land him in the hospital, but he found the question of which injury has been the most painful "frustrating" until he "had a definitive answer after having third degree burns on 15 percent of my body" while filming a stunt for his own comedy special in 2017. (He also went to the hospital to treat burns while filming Jackass 3D, during which he also broke his nose and seriously injured his back when he was thrown down a flight of stairs for Jackass Number Two's closing credits.)
During the series' three-season run on MTV, Steve-O lost 30 percent of the skin on his posterior and couldn't sit for two weeks after falling out of a red wagon as it went down a hill. When filming resumed, he once again suffered an injury when his nipple was blasted off by a BB gun. (The bullet is still lodged in his chest.) While the stunt wasn't initially aired, the footage was released in 2016.
In a Jan. 19 Instagram post, Steve-O revealed he visited the hospital "many" times while filming Jackass Forever.
"So the big question is what was it like making a Jackass movie now that we're so much older," Steve-O said in a recent YouTube video. "And the answer, well, it takes less for our bones to break and it also takes less to knock us completely unconscious. And longer for us to wake up, too."
Revealing his "scariest injuries" happened while filming the fourth installment, the stand-up comedian then detailed how he was knocked unconscious when he fell on a treadmill, only to hit his head again on the concrete. "I remember waking up on the stretcher, but I don't remember getting into the ambulance or arriving at the hospital...concussions are scary, dude. I don't want any more of this things."
Another mishap occurred when he "broke the shit out of " his collarbone, having to undergo surgery in order to heal faster.
"I got a killer scar out of it," he concluded, "and, check it out dude, the footage didn't even make the movie."
There is a reason the former professional snowboarder's nicknamed "Danger Ehren" as he often performs some of the series' most treacherous stunts.
The most brutal injury the 45-year-old sustained was a fractured skull after the Jackass 3 team attempted to pull his tooth out by using a string tied to a Lamborghini. (Yes, our stomach just dropped, too.) "I broke my face all the way up to almost my eye," McGhehey told Willamete Week in 2010. "And that was pretty gnarly."
McGhehey then listed his other injuries since Jackass began 10 years prior. "I've had two surgeries on my finger. I broke my nose four times. I've had nine surgeries on my knee total," he detailed. "Lost a total of now three teeth basically. Broke my back. Sunburned my body so bad that it took three months for it to actually heal."
Finally, the stuntman revealed to Cinema Blend that he ruptured a testicle while filming Jackass Forever when he "begged" his co-star Dave England to jump on a Pogo stick on his...well, you get the idea.
Nicknamed "Party Boy" for his tendency to perform stunts naked, the former skateboarder admitted to UpRoxx that his worst experience while filming was "when they made the mistake scheduling three dick stunts in a row" for Jackass 3D.
"The first one, they made like a balsa wood penis to wear over my penis, and they put this woodpecker on it, and they had the woodpecker try to peck through," the 47-year-old explained. "And it hurt really bad when the pecker would hit my pecker. The beak went into my pee hole! Oh, God, it hurt so bad. And then the next day, they had me put it in a mousetrap, which evolved into a rat trap." The third one involved a snake.
As for the most painful stunt that did not involve his penis, Pontius pointed to a moment from his spinoff series, Wild Boyz when he performed the Glove of Ants, a rite of passage for an Amazonian tribe.
"You put these ants, called bullet ants, they weave them into this glove, and when boys come of age, you put this glove on that has hundreds of ants that have the most painful sting of any insect," he explained. "You wear this glove for the duration of the shaman singing this song, which is about eight minutes or so. You get stung hundreds of times, and that was by far the worst, most painful, dreadful thing I've ever done in my life combined. It's just like venom for 24 hours, and there's nothing you can do about it. So yeah, that was the worst thing. I would never do that again."
Jackass Forever is now playing in theaters.