For Jackass to live Forever, it needed fresh blood. Rest assured, the young recruits delivered their pound of flesh.
It's been more than 10 years since Jackass 3D. Middle-agedness has come for them all, as well as fatherhood, brain damage, and other strains of their heyday mayhem. 'If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough' is the old adage, and maybe we'll get Son of Jackass in 2063 – but the boys know their invincibility is waning; it was time to bring some new stars into the fold.
Say hello to Eric Manaka, Sean 'Poopies' McInerney, Zach Holmes, Jasper and, breaking barriers for the once male-locked crew, Rachel Wolfson. For them, it was a dream come true – but how does one get inducted into Jackass?
Ahead of the release of Jackass Forever, the fourth big-screen outing for our beloved masochists, I sat down with the newcomers to learn more about how they were welcomed into the series.
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Holmes, best known for co-creating MTV's Too Stupid To Die, explained, 'I just got hit up online randomly. It was just from a random Instagram account, then just ended up meeting Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine. I thought it was fake, actually. It ended up being real, then eventually we ended up making a movie.'
Like many, I fell in love with Jackass as a child – but Holmes had to manoeuvre his way around his parents. 'I wasn't allowed to watch Jackass when I was a kid, so I had to sneak to watch it. It had a huge influence on me; watching Jackass... it just looked so fun. It's all I ever wanted to do with my life pretty much.'
Poopies, best known for his role in Who is J.O.B?, said, 'So I met Trip Taylor, one of the producers for Jackass, when I was 16. I started doing some stuff in Hawaii with Red Bull TV, we became the number one web series and they were looking for new talent, so Trip introduced me. They flew me over, and that was it. I was really honoured to be working with those guys, it was a dream come true.'
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Jasper, who appears in the film alongside his dad Dark Shark, found director Jeff Tremaine and Shawna England through Loiter Squad and Jasper and Errol's First Time. 'One day she gave me a call and said they were gonna do a new movie and they wanted me and my dad on it,' he said.
Wolfson's entry into the group, momentous given their earlier hesitance to recruit a woman, comes courtesy of her social media catching the eye of Knoxville. 'I remember one day in 2019, Johnny Knoxville was liking all of my jokes and posts on Instagram. He was really supportive, way more supportive than my boyfriend at the time... like why is Johnny Knoxville liking everything and you don't like one picture?' she said.
'Sometime in May, Knoxville slid into my DMs and I too thought it was a prank. He asked if I wanted to have a phone call and then he explained it was an anniversary special – he didn't reveal it was the movie initially – and he asked me to come in for a meeting with him and Jeff Tremaine. It was truly the quickest meeting I've ever been a part of. They asked if I wanted to work with them on Jackass, and I said absolutely. The rest is history.'
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Jackass Forever hits cinemas on Friday, February 4.
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Topics: Entertainment, Jackass, Film and TV
Cameron Frew