The First Stunt The Jackass Cast Turned Down Involved A Bounce House
The "Jackass" cast nary encounters a stunt that they'll outright refuse. That has been the case since 2000, when Johnny Knoxville and his fellow agents of chaos graced television sets for the first time. Poop jokes and amateur bull-fighting turned out to be a cash cow, and "Jackass" has since grown into a beloved franchise of feature films, specials, and spin-offs.
For over 20 years, the "Jackass" cast has been injuring and humiliating themselves silly in such inspired stunts as "BMX Joust" and "Alligator Tightrope." Knoxville alone has endured 16 or 17 concussions — he isn't entirely sure — and a run-in with a bull in "Jackass Forever" caused him to sustain brain damage. According to Steve-O, the gang unanimously drew the line at a downhill bounce house. In a video on his YouTube channel, Steve-O recalled traveling to Northern California to shoot stunts in the snow for 2010's "Jackass 3D."
"They had a big bounce house on a ski slope headed for this, like, Olympic ski jump, and the idea was to have the whole cast in it," said Steve-O. "Even though we hated the idea of our heads clashing together in the bounce house, we probably still would have done it," he continued. Indeed, plenty of "Jackass" stunts have packed the performers into ill-advised modes of transit like shopping carts and urban kayaks. The bounce house was nixed because of the massive generator attached to the back, which kept it inflated.
The bounce house generator was deemed too dangerous
The "Jackass" gang has a knack for taking innocuous childhood relics to the heights of their bone-breaking potential. Consider the humble seesaw, which turns terrifying inside a bullring in "Jackass Number Two." In the sequence, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Johnny Knoxville, and Chris Pontius sit on a four-way Toro Totter and dodge a charging bull, all while donning propeller caps and holding lollipops. Roller skates, too, are a rollicking good time — unless you're wearing them in the back of a moving semi truck, as seen in "Jackass: The Movie."
The ski slope bounce house would have followed in that grand tradition, if not for the threat of a generator racing down a mountain. "The thing was like 500 pounds, I think," Steve-O explained, "and we just were not willing to have that generator land on us and crush us to death." The prospect of a mountaintop death united the cast for the first time. "So the whole cast backed out — maybe the first time the whole cast backed out of a stunt, you know, ever." That being said, each cast member has his own particularities when it comes to selecting stunts.
The "Jackass" cast has endured a troubling amount of injuries, ranging from orbital fractures to broken collar bones (and that's just Knoxville). Even for them, blunt force trauma to the head is nothing to sneeze at, especially when the object in question weighs 500 pounds and is careening down a mountain just behind you.
Every Jackass performer has his list of no-nos
The unanimous rejection of the downhill bounce house was a rare moment of unity for the "Jackass" cast. At least one cast member is typically game for any stunt, though each has his own particularities. Steve-O has been especially vocal about which stunts he has nixed in the past.
In the first "Jackass" movie, Ryan Dunn had an uncomfortable and, shall we say, intimate experience with a toy car, resulting in an infamous doctor's visit. Dunn acted as a willing stand-in when Steve-O dropped out. "It would disappoint my dad too much," Steve-O said in retrospect in his YouTube video, "so I said I couldn't do it."
Other times, good old fashioned fear got in the way. For "Jackass Number 2," Steve-O was supposed to ride a unicycle on a makeshift balance beam over a bed of hot coals. "I could not even bring myself to commit both feet to the pedals," he continued. "I wimped out just so bad. That one kills me the most."
For Johnny Knoxville, it took his bull-induced brain hemorrhage to convince him to stop doing the sort of large-scale stunts for which he's become known. Funnily enough, the career stunt performer's biggest hang-up isn't professional boxers or close-range BB gun shots -– it's the cold. "I'm not super fearful of it but I don't like cold weather or cold water," Knoxville told NME in 2022. "I've done stuff in cold weather and cold water but it's just a hassle."