ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Jackass star and entertainer Steve-O about his new stand-up special, Steve-O’s Bucket List. The star discussed his experience at clown college and working with Spike Jonze. The special is now available on Steve-O’s official website.
“If you thought Steve-O was crazy before, then get ready for his unrated Steve-O’s Bucket List, his new stand up special filmed in front of a sold-out London crowd,” reads the special’s synopsis. “With a complete disregard for societal norms, laws, and his own well-being, Steve-O is in top form as he brings his multimedia comedy tour straight into your living room with his hilarious stand-up and stunts deemed ‘too extreme’ for Jackass … oh, yeah … and it’s a love story too! Steve-O’s Bucket List not only pushes him to his limits but also finds him his ‘happily ever after’ that will melt your heart or passed out on the floor.”
Tyler Treese: Congrats on your new special, Steve-O’s Bucket List. You’ve been doing this tour for a while, and I thought the disclaimer at the beginning sets it up really well. It says it contains, “Seriously f—ed up shit, including reckless, illegal, and life-threatening stunts, graphic violence, nudity, and full-on pornography.” You deliver all of that and then some. I thought this was as hilarious as it was disgusting, and it was quite often very disgusting, so you definitely deliver. How was it, making this special and delivering that tour experience that you’ve been doing for a home audience?
Steve-O: First off man, thank you, dude. It is an ambitious warning at the beginning, and it’s very satisfying to me that, as you watch this special, each promise in the warning is delivered. What it was like to put this show together, I would describe as long and gradual. I literally worked on this show for more than five years. The first bit, which I referred to as a bucket list item, was almost in my last special. It was taped in 2017, and the last bit was 2022. I mean, I worked on this show for well over five years and never stopped kicking bits out, replacing them with better ones like filming more, tightening it up, and adding stuff. It was really pretty remarkable how consistently the show evolved.
I wanted to ask about your evolution because you’ve always had charisma and a stage presence. You introduce all these bits, you’re doing some stand-up between showing the videos. How was it coming into your own as a speaker on stage and tightening up those bits as well? People take for granted how much work goes into really tightening the stand-up portion.
Thank you so much, man. This is my third special, and if I’m honest, I taped my first special long before I was ready. As such, that first comedy special, I believe, did more harm than good. I just wasn’t there with my performance. My second special — I taped [it] two and a half years after the first — showed great improvement, and it had a multimedia component where I edited in footage of the stories happening in post-production, which was really exciting. It got me interested in taking this multimedia approach to my tour.
But as much as that second special was improved, it still was “oof,” you know? Thankfully, I took a full five and a half years between taping the second and the third, and I think that really shows. By the time I taped this one, Steve-O’s Bucket List, that’s a guy on that stage who’s been touring, doing stand-up comedy for more than 13 years. I can’t thank you enough for putting it that way, “to have come into my own.”
You definitely see the polish here. You can tell that you’ve thought a lot about what you’re saying and what you’re doing. I was curious about the overall iteration process on these stunts. It’s wild enough to come up with some of these ideas, but how do you go from, “Wouldn’t that be crazy if I did it,” to then actually doing all the work involved and actually doing it? I’m sure there are so many little things that have to be brought up.
100%. The real work, a lot of the time, is in setting up the shoot — particularly with the “ejaculating while falling out of an airplane” stunt. [Laughs]. That took a lot of tries, man. It took a lot. I also think it takes a lot to present that video. I think it’s testimony to how far I’ve actually come with the stand-up that I can tell the story of sky-jacking in such a way that it makes people not only okay with watching me jack off, but to do so joyfully in a group of a thousand people in a theater. It’s wild. It’s wild stuff, dude. I just love that I’ve done something so absurd. [Laughs].
We see your lovely fiancé throughout. So many people have seen your dick throughout the years — that has to be absurd. Is there a limit to what you won’t show or do? You’ve been very open, physically and emotionally through trauma, with the audience. I feel like people know and appreciate so much about your story and your life. Is there anything that you keep to yourself?
Not a whole lot, that’s for sure. As you put that question together, it struck me that I really have shared an awful lot, and what should I be worried about? I think I go through phases of being really, really anxious and high-strung and trying to force things to happen. I’ve gone overboard with it, dude. [Laughs] I really have. I think that certain things that I try to force to happen that that don’t happen, they’re just not supposed to happen, you know? I think that there’s a lot to be said for just taking a step back, you know?
Spike Jonze gets a thank you in the credits, and he’s always producing and writing on the movies, but he’s best known for these very artistic films. How has it been working with him throughout the years? It’s just such a departure from what he’s best known for, that he’s doing these crazy stunt movies with you guys.
I actually submit that it’s the other way around. [Laughs]. Spike’s first-ever video project was a skateboarding video called Rubbish Heap, which featured some pretty terrible stuff. [Laughs]. He came up in the world of BMX and skateboarding, and that’s very much the world that Jackass and Steve-O came out of. The departure was really into this high art, super sophisticated, Academy Award-winning movies. But I think that, yeah, this type of stuff, I think, is really Spike’s origin.
That’s really cool that he’s still doing both. Fans of yours will be so excited to know there’s a bunch of great members that pop up throughout the special here. How important has it been that you guys have always supported each other’s individual endeavors? I think fans really get a kick out of you guys actually being friends and supporting each other rather than just hanging out when filming’s happening.
Right, man. I couldn’t have said it better. We really are friends, you know? It means the world that the guys have been so supportive and willing to show up and be on camera and participate in something that I’m trying to do by myself. It’s epic, man. The relationship I have with the guys is more than special for sure.
Your ears are also pretty special, as we learn, as they will not call a flower. [Laugh]. You just had a “who’s who” of former UFC stars like Jorge Masvidal, Chuck Liddell was there, and Jon Jones. They were all beating the shit out of your poor ear. I see you pop up at UFC events. Can you talk a little bit about how you got into mixed martial arts as a fan? It’s really cool to see them embraced in this special in a small way.
Yeah, for sure, man. I’d love to say that I’ve always been a UFC fan, but I haven’t. It was 2016, I came in on the Ronda Rousey hype, and once that happened, I just got more and more in love with it, and now I’m like a complete psycho. [Laughs]. I just sit there and watch every single fight and sometimes, I wonder what the hell is wrong with me that I enjoyed so much.
MMA has some really “out there” personalities. We don’t see that all the time in other sports, but MMA is more rugged and more out there. That’s definitely a part that fans really appreciate, is the personalities of somebody like Masvidal or Jones. You don’t really see that a ton elsewhere. They’re not as PR trained.
Yeah, it’s true. You don’t hear from other athletes quite as much. I think that’s great too. The way that Dana [White] is about just letting anybody say whatever they’re going to say and not getting bent out of shape — I am just such a fan of Dana, man.
He’s a character. Speaking of which, in that combat sports realm, you had a fight when you appeared on WWE. Umaga went crazy on you. You were kind of moving when you weren’t supposed to, and he took some liberties there and started elbowing you for real during that segment. What are your memories of working with Umaga and appearing inside the WWE ring?
I just remember walking through what the match was going to look like. You agree to sort of an outline, like bullet points of what moves are going to be, and you walked through it. Then I remember when the show was live and it was actually happening, it was just such a wildly different experience. I felt like he was just hitting me so hard, and then the last move that we discussed happens, and it’s supposed to be over, but he is still hitting me. I didn’t know that he was hitting me because I wasn’t playing dead, and I didn’t know I was supposed to play dead. So, yeah, that got crazy, man. I actually don’t remember … yeah, I don’t remember leaving the ring at all.
That’s a crazy experience. I was also curious: Did you have any interactions with Vince McMahon during that?
Pontius remembers it better than I do. I seem to recall my first memory being in a control room, and according to Pontius, Vince McMahon was just super jazzed. Like, “Oh, that was great!” I know that that’s how Pontius recounts it, but I don’t trust my own memory quite as much, so I’m just taking it word for it. [Laughs].
That’s incredible. I think maybe something you should have more memories of was you in the very last year of the clown college. What exactly goes on in clown college? To be one of the last college-educated clowns has to be pretty special.
Yeah, for sure, man. Clown college was more like bootcamp for circus clowns than it was like college. It was two months — like an eight-week program — so more like bootcamp, and it was intensive. We trained 14 hours a day and all kinds of stuff with the makeup and the skills and the acrobatics and dance and improv and comedy and all this kind of stuff. It was an amazing experience, for sure.
It’s a real blessing in disguise that you didn’t wind up going down that path and you weren’t selected there. Imagine all this didn’t happen and you were just a clown. It’s crazy to think about those sorts of divergence points.
There’s an amazing amount of truth to that. I imagine I’m probably quite a bit older than you, but I remember when I was a kid, there was a cartoon called Mr. Magoo, and it was this guy that didn’t know what was going on. He could barely see, and the opening of every episode was him just walking through and he didn’t even realize that he was in such peril. He would step off the thing, and it would be a huge skyscraper, but as he took the step, a beam would come and meet his foot, and he was just walking through life oblivious to the fact that it was just total peril that he was narrowly escaping.
My story’s a little bit like that — just taking a step with nothing there, and something comes to meet my foot. That’s how I’ve walked through life in a lot of ways. It makes you think that the universe really has a plan for me or had a plan for me all along.
