Source: Entertainment Weekly

Steve-O is reflecting on his best and worst stunts from Jackass.

In celebration of Jackass: Best and Last, the entertainer discusses every stunt that he performed across all the Jackass movies in a new video interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Early in the video, Steve-O explains how he took a lot of drugs prior to the Tropical Pole Vaulting stunt in the original Jackass: The Movie.

“I spent a day doing cocaine, and then I spent the next day still awake pole vaulting all over the place, making terrible decisions,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be great if I took a pole vault to the beach and the bushes and a gross river and just launched myself into all kinds of stuff?'”

Steve-O remembers the franchise’s director, Jeff Tremaine, strongly supporting his idea for the pole vaulting bit. “He set it up for me to train with the pole vaulting team at UCLA,” he says. “And I really diligently trained. I worked as hard as I could, and I never got any good pole vaulting.”

He adds, “I can’t even believe tropical pole vaulting made the movie, it was so half-assed and weak, and I was just on drugs, too. Hadn’t slept in days.”

That wasn’t the only time that Jackass and drugs intersected. Steve-O said that after filming a segment with whale sharks in Japan, he and his castmates discovered that psilocybin mushrooms were legal in the country.

“We ate way too many mushrooms that night,” he said. “I was just laying in this bed peeing all over myself. [Chris] Pontius was in the bathroom doing something he called ‘reverse diarrhea in the mirror.’ Yeah, that night got real ugly.”

Steve-O famously got sober between the second and third Jackass films, which led to him taking a different approach to his stunts in 2010’s Jackass 3D.

“Going into this third Jackass movie, I’ve survived too much. Now I’m clean and sober. I’m not taking any crazy risks,” he says while discussing the “Electric Avenue” stunt that involved passing through a hallway full of cattle prods and stun guns. “As long as I don’t have to worry about being killed or paralyzed, I’ll do whatever and I’ll never back out. And this Electric Avenue one really put that one to the test.”

He continued, “I remember just thinking, ‘Ugh.’ I knew that I couldn’t be paralyzed or killed, but I didn’t wanna do it. But ultimately I honored my word and I got through it.”

Steve-O says that his castmates’ reactions to Jackass antics helps the team gauge which stunts are particularly successful.

“You can tell when a Jackass bit works because what we call the peanut gallery, all the guys gathered around watching, their reaction is the barometer for how well we did,” he says. “When everybody’s excited like that and laughing and cheering, that’s when you know you got something really good.”