Why does johnny knoxville wear sunglasses

Knoxville, naturally, was Bugs Bunny, the stick of dynamite not quite hidden behind his back. His costars were a rowdy band of fuckups: skaters and stunt performers and one enormous guy and one Wee Man and, in Steve-O, one Ringling Bros. They appeared to genuinely love one another—but to only be able to show that love through increasingly baroque forms of torture. What they assembled was possibly the most efficient show in the history of television: Bits were rarely more than a minute or two long, and some of the strongest topped out at 15 seconds.

It was wall-to-wall mayhem. It was easy at the time to describe Jackass as lowest-common-denominator entertainment, a feeble nadir in TV's race to the bottom. With time, though, it became clear that the show was operating at the intersection of a number of ancient American traditions. If you squinted, you could see traces of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges. Knoxville's outlaw influences were present too. Spike Jonze told me that he and Tremaine and Knoxville hadn't discussed how the stunts might be introduced on the show, so Knoxville improvised what would become a signature opening to each segment.

I was like, damn…no wonder it's so iconic. At the center of it all, of course, was Knoxville, handsome and chatty and willing to both suffer and inflict enormous indignities. Steve-O philosophized that Knoxville's magnetism was rooted in his clumsiness. Knoxville doesn't have any of that, so when Knoxville falls down, it's like, it's devastating. Later, while conducting a Zoom call from his office chair, he'd pull his left leg behind his head to demonstrate.

But Knoxville brought something else to the show, Steve-O said—a kind of unimpeachable courage. It's so counterintuitive. It's just so fucking backwards, you know? That the star happened to be even better at taking the abuse than his psycho castmates basically guaranteed the show's success. It would have been hard for it not to make television history. Immediately Jackass became a cultural lightning rod. Senator Joe Lieberman called for MTV to change or cancel the show, citing a spate of teenagers who suffered injuries after copying notable stunts.

According to Tremaine, the network responded. Frustrated, Knoxville quit less than a year after the first season had aired. They'd managed to film only 24 episodes and a special, but MTV recycled the material endlessly. Despite its brevity, the show was able to graze, or even predict, a number of emerging cultural trends.

It helped hasten MTV's shift to reality-based content. Hollywood began to throw money at films— Old School , Step Brothers , The Hangover —about stunted, self-thwarting men. Platforms like YouTube, Vine, and TikTok, which would build billion-dollar businesses atop clips of people doing stupid things, were years away.

But perhaps the most interesting thing Jackass revealed was that the very nature of fame was shifting in early-aughts America.

When Kim Kardashian was barely out of high school, men like Knoxville and Steve-O and Bam Margera and Chris Pontius were proving that you could become famous by doing whatever it took to hold an audience's attention. Steve-O and Pontius got their own show, Wildboyz, a nature-inflected take on Jackass.

Margera got one too, focusing on his attempts to terrorize his suburban-Pennsylvania friends. All had come by their fame honestly—by taking as much abuse as they could stomach and hoping people liked it. And people really, really liked it. To get it done, Knoxville says, they insured it stunt by stunt. What a ridiculous feeling.

What a silly film to be number one. By , when Jackass 3D more than doubled that figure, the Jackass -ification of pop culture was more or less complete. If the money changed the guys, they didn't show it. And they all had black eyes. I of course wondered why they had black eyes, and they explained that they had to take their lot ID photos—the little card that gets you onto the production lot—and they wanted to make sure they had black eyes for their pictures.

So they punched each other in the face. For an ID! This is not part of the movie or the show. This is just three crazy people. This past spring, Knoxville celebrated his 50th birthday at his home in L. It was a low-key day, spent with his wife, Naomi, and their two children, Rocko and Arlo.

Madison, his adult daughter with his first wife, lives in Austin. Naomi whipped up a playlist of their favorite songs, heavy on Willie Nelson. And when he traveled to Amsterdam, he admired art in the Van Gogh museum instead of getting "dizzy" off of marijuana.

As a young man, Johnny Knoxville had stars in his eyes. Before he became a stuntman, he was an aspiring actor who moved to Los Angeles to try his luck in the entertainment industry. He was so dedicated to making his dream happen that he enrolled in the Pasadena School of Dramatic Arts — a stint that lasted only a few weeks, according to The New York Times. As he explained to The Washington Times , he had a feeling from an early age that he was made to be on screen — or at the very least, it was a line of work that seemed like something he'd be chill with taking on.

According to Knoxville, when he was around 13 years old, he believed acting "sounded like a job with the least amount of work involved," so, that is the career path he set his sights on. Ironically enough, he has ended up putting in a lot of hard work into his show business career.

His IMDb page shows he's been a writer, producer, and actor across dozens of projects in the entertainment industry. While he was living in Los Angeles, Johnny Knoxville worked as a part-time scribe as he pursued an acting career. In , he "proposed a story for which he would test self-defense equipment, like pepper spray and stun guns, on himself. This began Knoxville's masochism to the delight of others.

His videos began "circulating on VHS tape" thanks to Knoxville's "compulsively watchable reactions. The franchise's creators' lives changed over the years, but their connection to "Jackass" remains intact: Tremaine has acted as director on all of the feature films, and Jonze is one of the producers.

Early in his career, Johnny Knoxville was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. According to the actor, "Saturday Night Live" approached him to become a cast member of the long-running sketch comedy series. With famous alumni like the multi-talented Tina Fey and the legendary comedian Chris Rock , this could have been a huge opportunity for Knoxville. But, he decided to turn down the offer. In an interview with The Washington Times , the "Jackass" star got into why he decided to pursue a different path outside of live comedy.

Knoxville ultimately chose filming with his friends over 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and as you might've gleaned, that choice panned out.

Then in , in the 30th season of "SNL," Knoxville had his chance to join the cast after all when he acted as a host. You know Johnny Knoxville from the "Jackass" franchise, but you may have missed his smaller roles that cover a wide range of styles. In this indie role, Knoxville portrayed "Phil Kaufman, the gonzo road manager of the s rock star Gram Parsons. Knoxville has lent his voice to several cartoon characters, too.

Every toy they ever made — skateboards, wristbands, all kinds of great stuff," he remembered. And in addition to all the free gifts, Knoxville said, "I got to do a photo shoot with SpongeBob. He went on to quip that he did all of his character's "stunts for this episode. Johnny Knoxville developed an on-screen family with the cast and crew of "Jackass. Knoxville and his wife Melanie Cates welcomed a daughter named Madison in After around a dozen years of marriage, Knoxville and Cates divorced.

Following the dissolution of his relationship with Cates, the stuntman walked down the aisle again. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Toronto Sun Manage Print Subscription. Main Menu Search torontosun. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Action Point is slated to hit theatres from March next year. We apologize, but this video has failed to load. Rick Kosick Self as Self. Dimitry Elyashkevich Self as Self. Jeff Tremaine. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Some of the footage is slowed down for maximal effect. This is repeated again at the end of the movie with additional explosions mixed in with gallons of water to wash away the cast- chaos is resumed.

Throughout the movie the team are subjected to the usual foray of physical abuse from team members or perform hilarious stunts including some of the more stomach turning stunts such as the Sweat suit cocktail, Toy Train Eruption and Poo Cocktail Supreme - not for the weak stomached! Rated R for male nudity, extremely crude and dangerous stunts throughout, and for language. Did you know Edit. The cast and crew refused to have alcohol on set to support Steve-O in his rehab process.

Goofs In the final 'explosive' scene, before the plunger is pushed, the corner of the room that Bam Margera is sitting in is relatively empty. However, when the Johnny Knoxville orders everyone to put on their goggles and proceeds to push the plunger, a bookcase appears in the corner. It has an extended version of the "Super Mighty Glue" scene were Dunn has his ass glued to Phil's back, then Bam glues his hand to Dunn's face. An extended version of "Will The Farter" were Bam smokes a cigarette that was in Will's butt, throws up and see's something in a cup and throws up again.

Another extended scene, during the "Duck Hunting" scene, Parks has to act as a target as well. There's also a additional scene, in another part of the Rocky bit, Dave Kosick gets smacked in the head. There's another extended scene, during the "Lamborghini Tooth Pull", Pontius brushes his teeth with an electric toothbrush and says: "If you wanna walk the walk you gotta talk the talk.

Or no one will take you serious. During the ending credits, there's alternative footage.