Stephen “Steve-O” Glover prides himself on living a life, mostly, filled with no regrets. But that doesn’t mean the Jackass alum looks back on all of his stunts fondly.
Steve-O details some of his personal and professional misadventures in his new book A Hard Kick in the Nuts. While speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, the 48-year-old Wildboyz star says it’s “a book of wisdom gleaned from a life of terrible decisions.”
“It’s certainly not an exercise in trying to make myself look good and that becomes very clear, very quickly,” he quips, but adds, “I’m not big on regrets.”
The entertainer continues: “There’s all kinds of stuff I regret having done in my personal life where I did harm, but in my professional life, whenever I’ve done harm to myself physically, that’s generally translated to great footage and a great story.”
Fans got to know Steve-O in the early aughts as one of the men of MTV’s Jackass, the reality show where he and pals Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera and others did absurd and dangerous stunts and pranks. But in 2017, the comedian did a stunt that made his Jackass days look tame: he laid down in rocket fuel to make snow angels, or rather, “fire angels.”
“The time when I laid down in a bit of rocket engine fuel and had to have skin graft surgery on 15 percent of my body… that story was so epic that footage is so, like, I like to think iconic,” he shares, but admits “that I don’t have a particularly high pain threshold.”
Steve-O ended up with third degree burns on 15 percent body.
“My overdeveloped need for attention outweighs my desire for comfort,” he laughs. “I didn’t go to the hospital for five days and it was the most horrific five days of my life.”
But the comedian says matter-of-factly: “I absolutely don’t regret that.”
The only stunts he does have some remorse over are when he “wasted the resources” of a city.
“Wasting first responders time, those are gonna be the stunts I regret,” he explains.
A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions is available now.
— Video produced by Olivia Schneider
