Johnny Knoxville: he shot himself in the chest, set himself on fire and had run-ins with the police, now everyone's favorite jackass takes a shot at the big screen

CN: So, why were you so bent on getting the actor Rip Taylor in the Jackass movie?

JK: I love Rip Taylor. And Jackass has a lot of gay undertones. It's pretty much chock full of 'em.

CN: Rip Taylor's gay? [Knoxville laughs] You're a small-town kid from Tennessee who couldn't make the rent five years ago, and now you're working with big name stars--like Rip Taylor--and getting paid big bucks essentially to make a fool of yourself. How does it feel?

JK: It's pretty bizarre. I don't really think about it too much. My parents get more of a kick out of it than I do. It's not that I don't appreciate what's happened, it's just that they really get a kick out of it. My old man wears his Jackass hat everywhere. My mom called and told me he was selling my autograph, but she was just bullshitting me.

CN: Actually, I looked on eBay, and your autograph is only worth 20 bucks.

JK: I'm sure. It's probably next to Steve Guttenberg and Tim Conway's.

CN: Do you think there's any chance of you utilizing your fame to help your daughter's band out?

JK: [laughs] Oh, the Green Beans? Yeah. I'm going to be a real stage dad, like Brian Wilson's father. Madison is my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter. My mother bought her a miniature Fender electric guitar, and she formed the Green Beans in our kitchen when she was three years old with her friend Malin on drums and her friend Nico on tambourine. They've never really played together, and Madison's only had one concert gig--she sang 'Happy Birthday" to our friend Sophia. Oh, you know what? She said she was forming the Green Beans, and we thought it was funny and we told a couple of friends. So then some producer from one of those Hard Copy-type shows calls, inquiring if Madison's band would like to play on the show. It's so ridiculous.

CN: Everyone asks why you do these stupid things you do. I don't think you need a reason, but someone out there might, so you should probably tell our readers what spawned all this.

JK: I don't really know. I was sick as a kid, with asthma and allergies, so maybe I'm making up for lost time.

CN: And your dad--wasn't he a big influence on all this?

JK: My old man, he's always cool. Was even back then--largely back then. I've documented a lot of the pranks that he did on workers at his tire company when I was growing up. All of his workers had nicknames--Big George, Big Sam, Ass-Kicking Robert, Box Car, Super Dick.... Big George, who was like 5'8", 320 lbs., the sweetest guy on the planet, was narcoleptic, so he was always falling asleep at work. He'd fall asleep and Dad would go up and put a paper bag over his head and Big George would wake up and think he'd gone blind. And because he didn't go to school, he couldn't read. So one day there's a picture of a gorilla in the paper and Dad showed it to Big George, who couldn't read the headline, and told him that it had escaped from the zoo. At the end of the day Dad goes, "Hey, George, could you go back into that stack of tires and pull four or five off the top for me?" So Big George goes to grab some, and dad had Box Car, his tire groover, in a gorilla outfit down in the tires. Box Car jumped out of the ti res and Big George just about beat the living shit out of Box Car before they could pull him off. That kind of backfired on Box Car, but it completely worked for Dad.