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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIt sounds ridiculous to say this, but Johnny Knoxville looks exactly like\u2026Johnny Knoxville. On the day we meet, he is wearing his trademark smoky\u2013lensed sunglasses, a thrift\u2013store shirt bearing (of course) the Budweiser KING OF BEERS insignia, navy blue chinos cut just above the ankle, white tube socks, and grubby black Chuck Taylor high\u2013tops. This uniform is so distinct and recognizable it's practically become Johnny Knoxville's version of the San Diego Chicken costume, to the point where if you saw anyone but Knoxville wearing it, you'd say to him,\"Hey, who do you think you are, Johnny Knoxville\"\n\nSuch is the scruffy, enviable, impossible\u2013to\u2013duplicate charm of Philip James (P. J.) Clapp, a.k.a. Johnny Knoxville. At 34, he is many things\u2014actor, stuntman, raconteur, writer, carouser, father, mediocre skateboarder, style icon, and tabloid\u2013alleged lady\u2013killer\u2014but one thing he is not is a wax\u2013chested, fake\u2013tanned, bleach\u2013toothed hunk of showbiz man meat. He's pasty and wiry and scarred and a little gimpy in the ankles. There's some living under his eyes, as they say, and there must be mornings when he doesn't look a day under 58. He has a tattoo of the toothless heavyweight Leon Spinks on his left biceps, talks loudly in public, and when he laughs, he explodes like a loaded Remington. He is the utter opposite of a celebrity like, say, Nick Lachey.\n\n!\n\n Okay, maybe that's not the best way to put it right now. Let's say John Stamos.\n\n!\n\n Better yet, let's leave it to Seann William Scott, Knoxville's costar in this month's The Dukes of Hazzard. Here's how he describes Knoxville's appeal \"Like when Nicholson really hit it in the '70s\u2014I think John's that kind of guy. There's nobody out there like him. He's undeniably charming, the kind of actor that guys want to hang out with and girls want to fuck.\" Yes, you're right, that last part is the old line they used to use about Sinatra, but would you complain if they used it about you\n\n!\n\n Still, when you see Johnny Knoxville in his Johnny Knoxville getup, you can't help but wonder if he's going to be rocking this look in twentyfive years, if one day you'll turn on Ian Ziering's Celebrity Roast on VH12 and there he'll be, crawling around the dais between Nicky Hilton and Freddy Adu in a pair of dirty Chucks and chopped\u2013up Dickies, slurping beer out of Sarah Michelle Gellar\u2013Prinze\u2013Osment's mug, and it will feel slightly depressing. Or maybe you'll turn on the TV twenty\u2013five years from now\u2014or, hell, five years from now\u2014and Johnny Knoxville will be there in a finely tailored suit and sensible leather shoes, and you'll have to explain to your kids that there was a time when he never would have dressed like that (except for, um, a magazine shoot) and that way back when, he was the star of this cuckoo TV show called Jackass, in which he hand\u2013inseminated cows and got kicked in the nuts by schoolchildren. And you'll look at this classed\u2013up, actorly Johnny Knoxville and think of it as one of the great public\u2013figure transitions of your time\u2014like how Hanks went from Bosom Buddies to Saving Private Ryan, or George W. Bush went from the den couch to the White House\u2014and you'll marvel at how he pulled it off.\n\nAnd it's only a slight overstatement to say if that transition is ever going to actually happen, it's going to happen now. Because now is a big moment in the career of Johnny Knoxville. Jackass, of course, is gone, and over the past few years Knoxville has committed himself pretty much completely to being an actor, so much so that in the next few months he'll appear in a Jude Law\u2013esque string of films. There's The Dukes of Hazzard, in which Knoxville plays the hillbilly outlaw Luke Duke; there's The Ringer, a Farrelly brothers caper in which Knoxville's character pretends to be developmentally disabled in order to fix the Special Olympics (hey, they can't all be Shakespeare in Love); this summer there was already Lords of Dogtown, in which Knoxville had a small part as skateboard guru Topper Burks; and this fall there's Daltry Calhoun, an indie in which Knoxville plays a small\u2013town businessman forced to care for a 14\u2013year\u2013old daughter he never knew he had. What all this means is this In the next few months, America is going to decide if it thinks Johnny Knoxville is a movie star or not.\n\n!\n\n When I meet Knoxville in New York, we have lunch and then decide to go get a drink. If you've read the manual, you know that the Johnny Knoxville Experience usually involves having a few. Sometimes more than a few. I'm not saying he's Peter O'Toole, but in an era in which celebrities rarely consume more than egg whites in the presence of strangers, Knoxville is blissfully laid\u2013back and uninhibited. That, and he really, really enjoys drinking.\n\nWe spend twenty minutes wandering around downtown, trying to find a table at an outdoor caf\u00E9, but it's one of those beautiful afternoons in Manhattan when everyone in the city has the exact same idea and it's impossible to find a place to sit. So we wind up buying a six\u2013pack of Stella Artois and sitting outside with our bottles in brown bags, like a couple of happy hobos. It's only a few minutes before passersby start doing double\u2013takes. The first person to approach is a German girl in her early twenties, who asks Knoxville if she can take his photo.\n\n\"Sure!\" Knoxville says, popping his choppers for her camera. \"You want a beer\"\n\nShe seems unsure if Knoxville is kidding or not. He's not.\n\n\"I'll give you a bag so the cops won't arrest you,\" Knoxville says to her, tucking away a Stella and handing it to her. \"If anyone gives you any problems, tell them I gave it to you, and they can come talk to me.\" She smiles, takes the beer, and skips away. As she leaves, a tall girl struts by. \"I love you, Johnny,\" she shrieks. \"I love it when you stick yourself and bleed.\"\n\n!\n\n I love it when you stick yourself and bleed. Jackassery, it's clear, breeds a certain\u2026familiarity. Over the years, Knoxville has grappled with female fans who've expressed their love by scorching him with cigarette butts and male admirers who've wanted to pummel his ass because, well, doesn't Johnny Knoxville enjoy getting his ass pummeled \"Guys have come up and either hit me in the balls or thrown a drink in my face, thinking I like this type of thing,\" he says.\n\n And therein lies the dilemma for the postJackassKnoxville. The show indelibly marked him as a masochistic clown, and no matter what he does on\u2013screen, we'll always love him for that first. If Johnny Knoxville ever wins an Oscar, he may be the first recipient the presenter kicks in the balls.\n\n!\n\n A note about the paragraphs above There's a little rule that every celebrity story should have at least one (often contrived) bit of thematic tension, and Being Taken Seriously is like the 7Eleven of celebrity\u2013story tensions\u2014always there, always open, always available. Can Charlize Theron be taken seriously Can the Backstreet Boys be taken seriously (The other superreliable is Happy at Last. Tom Cruise is happy at last. Julia Roberts is happy at last. Slobodan Milosevic is happy at last.) One of the difficult things about Johnny Knoxville, though, is that he's intelligent and self\u2013aware and pretty attuned to celebrity\u2013story affectations, so he doesn't play along and let you come up with some dumb\u2013ass little box to stick his life inside. When I ask him if it's weird to be famous for being himself\u2014because he can't just say he was playing some character on TV; he actually is the guy he played on TV\u2014Knoxville looks at me blankly for a second, and then we both start laughing, because it really is a dumb\u2013ass question, and he called me on it.\n\nStill, it is not that dumbass to say that Knoxville really does have a little box to crawl out of. In the time we spend together, people don't come up to him and say they loved him in A Dirty Shame or Walking Tall. They tell him they loved Jackass. This is what he's up against. We really do love him when he sticks himself and bleeds.\n\n!\n\n Who said the following, Johnny Knoxville or Tom Cruise\n\n (a) \"Listen, success and awards are great. But you have to understand me The doing of it is the accomplishment. I love making movies.\"\n\n (b) \"I want to do dramas. I want to do comedies. I don't know how much I give a fuck about romantic comedies. I don't know if you are going to see me in Hope Floats 2.\"\n\n (c) \"I love pressure. When you're making movies, there's always a lot of pressure, and you've got to know that you're going to get through the day and things will be okay.\"\n\n (d) \"I pretty much operate on adrenaline and ignorance.\"\n\n (e) \"As a kid, I didn't have the Internet. I didn't have a television. The movies were my only way out of town.\"\n\n (f) \"Tequila makes you mental.\"\n\n Answers (a) Cruise, (b) Knoxville, (c) Cruise, (d) Knoxville, (e) Cruise, (f) Knoxville.\n\n!\n\n Halfway through my first beer, Knoxville becomes the first person since my freshmanyear roommate to tell me to take my skirt off. \"The hell you doing\" he says. \"You're not even drinking! Is this your day off Jesus. Here I thought you were wearing pants, and you're sitting around wearing a skirt.\" He unloads his shotgun cackle. \"You can't imagine how well that really lame insult works,\" he says, and then starts recalling times he's been goaded into doing dumb things by the dreaded skirt gibe. \"It's soooo good. Soooo juvenile. So instantly effective.\"\n\n!\n\n Knoxville needed a little persuasion to make The Dukes of Hazzard. He was a fan of the TV series as a kid, but as he says, \"I just wanted to make sure they weren't trying to make some hokey middle\u2013of\u2013the road comedy. I just wanted some reassurances we were going to take some chances.\" But Dukes proved to be a southern\u2013fried fantasy camp for the Tennessee\u2013raised Knoxville, who grew up idolizing black\u2013hatted rebels like the late Waylon Jennings, who sang the TV show's theme song; Willie Nelson, who plays the Duke boys' uncle Jesse in the film; and Burt Reynolds, who plays the white\u2013suited Boss Hogg. \"Pretty much a paid vacation,\" Knoxville says of the experience. \" &#145;Yee\u2013haw' here, &#145;yee\u2013haw' there, jump over that, hit that guy.\"\n\nThe Dukes of Hazzard also represents the featurefilm debut of Jessica Simpson, who plays the cutoffswearing manbait Daisy Duke. \"She walks on the set so natural and comfortable,\" says Knoxville, who came up with the idea that the filmmakers use a Bo Diddley song for Simpson's opening shot\u2014a slow crawl up her legs. \"Apparently, she'd been doing a lot of squats. She was in tremendous shape. But she's so nice and open and sweet to everyone, and she looks great on film. Insane.\"\n\n!\n\n Does being a movie star matter to Johnny Knoxville It does and it doesn't. He'll tell you his acting heroes are guys like Sean Penn and Johnny Depp\u2014cred\u2013first actors who've had as many noble misses as box\u2013office hits\u2014but you can tell he's itching for some mainstream success. Still, he's quick to admit that he's got some growing to do as an actor. He'll even cop to a subpar performance in Grand Theft Parsons, in which he starred as Phil Kaufman, the eccentric manager of the country rocker Gram Parsons, who stole his late client's body in order to bury it in the desert. \"I was really bummed how Grand Theft Parsons came out,\" Knoxville says.\n\n\"Because I am such a huge fan of Gram, and I love Phil Kaufman, and everyone just had such good intentions on the movie. I felt like that was a miss and I didn't put my best foot forward. I got an acting coach right after the film.\"\n\nHere's Knoxville's former Jackass colleague, Chris Pontius, on Grand Theft Parsons \"I didn't really like that movie. But I didn't like Gram Parsons's music in the first place. His riffs were all wrong, and he chose the wrong chords. I think God struck him down for making such shitty music. So that movie was doomed from the start.\"\n\nWe should all have a buddy like Pontius.\n\n!\n\n Katrina Holden Bronson, the writer and director of Daltry Calhoun, thinks Knoxville will wind up surprising people as an actor. \"He has incredible range,\" Bronson says. \"If Johnny wants to, he'll absolutely have a very long career.\" And it's true that even if you can't see Johnny Knoxville as a popcorn\u2013movie star, helming The Chronicles of Riddick 6 or Batman Goes to Japan, it's not such a stretch to imagine him as a likable character actor, someone with enough presence and grit to steal a scene or two. But Bronson thinks Knoxville is a leading man. She described his performance in the darkly comic Daltry Calhoun as \"a hybrid Jack Nicholson\u2013Jimmy Stewart thing.\"\n\nWhich is another way of saying Johnny Knoxville is authentic. Sure, he can be slippery about some elements of his life, but you never get the impression that Knoxville is a poseur, that instead of partying until 5 a.m. he secretly goes home and wraps himself in 600\u2013thread Egyptian cotton, nurses a banana smoothie, and watches According to Jim (though that would be pretty funny). No, Knoxville is the real thing, which is why he doesn't just idolize Sean Penn; he's friends with him. Then again, Knoxville is also friends with Rip Taylor, the comic troubadour best known for flinging around a bucket of confetti. Taylor was cast in two of Knoxville's movies He appeared at the end of Jackass, and he filmed a scene for The Dukes of Hazzard in which (Rip Taylor spoiler alert!) he and Knoxville share a bunk bed with a pair of fine ladies. Taylor tells me that Knoxville is \"wonderful,\" \"downtoearth,\" \"outrageous,\" \"certifiably insane,\" and \"taking ugly pills.\" He also made a hair joke about Burt Reynolds that I bet he's told at least 3,000 times. And guess what It was still funny!\n\n!\n\n Part of what makes Knoxville appealing as a person is that he's the kind of guy who can be friends with both Sean Penn and Rip Taylor. He's not about exclusion or even being cool. One of the many things that made Jackass brilliantly winning was that it was the first show on MTV where people weren't trying desperately to be cool. Sure, they had a certain scrubby appeal, but the guys on Jackass were basically dorks. And yet there they were on national television, sailing shopping carts across parking lots, puking up goldfish, having what looked to be the best time ever had without girls. Suddenly, every guy started acting like them. \"I love the Jackass brotherhood,\" says Knoxville's cousin Roger Alan Wade, the country\u2013music singer and author of such hits as \"Gone Back to Whoring\" and \"My Baby Loves Malt Liquor.\" \"It reminds me of Jack and Neal and Ginsberg and the whole Beats thing. They affect fashion and music and language in an amazing way.\"\n\nIndeed, though it was only on for three seasons, it's tough to think of a more influential show in the past decade. I'm trying hard not to say that Jackass was an Important Cultural Moment, but that's precisely what it was. Jackass signaled the exact moment uncool became cool in America. You can look at a lot of cooluncool totems\u2014Penguin shirts, Napoleon Dynamite, Pabst Blue Ribbon\u2014and see, at least partly, the hand of Johnny Knoxville and his gang. And if you don't like any of those things, you can blame them, too.\n\n!\n\n They still hang out, the Jackass guys. Knoxville recently bolted to Argentina with Chris Pontius and Steve \"Steve\u2013O\" Glover to tape an episode of Wildboyz, the pair's Animal Planet\u2013onamphetamines nature series for MTV. The exasses hung out and rode wild horses and watched killer whales flop up on the beach and munch baby seals. \"With all his humongous movie contracts, it surprises me that Knoxville would bother shooting our crappy TV show,\" SteveO tells me. \"I can't even tell you what it means to us.\"\n\n SteveO also says he's never seen one of Knoxville's movies, then adds that his friend is \"getting paid a lot of money to try to act.\" Bam Margera, who has his own MTV spinoff called Viva La Bam, says he's only seen Knoxville in Men in Black II. \"I thought it was pretty good,\" Margera says. \"But I am used to seeing Johnny get kicked in his beanbag, then thrown into a baby pool of barf, so I would prefer to see the stunts. That's why I'm looking forward to The Ringer. It seems like there are some Jackasss\n\nHe doesn't come flat out and say it, but you can tell it drives Knoxville a little nuts that he and his pals never got a big payday from Jackass. MTV was still a notoriously tightwad outfit when the show was on the air, and it wasn't until Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne (whose reality hit was MTV's next smash after Jackass) practically extorted the network that they started paying some righteous bread.\n\n \"We were like the baseball players in the 1950s before free agency,\" Knoxville says. \"Fucking shit! We were getting paid zeero! But whatever. It worked out for us. It's just one of those things you laugh about.\"\n\n! Johnny Knoxville's biggest idol is the late singer Johnny Cash, whom he loved because \"he wrote about the tramps and the beggars and the whores and the street thieves and the guys in jail\u2014all the guys that mattered.\" In fact, Knoxville recently bought one of Cash's homes in Tennessee. Here's how he described his purchase in an article he wrote for Vice magazine\n\nI bought it sight unseen. Johnny Cash signed the deed over on a Monday, and he died that Friday. Holy fuck, I was crushed.\u2026 I goddamn cried my eyes out all weekend. Aside from booze, what kinda helped me get through it all was the fact that I was now the proud owner of Johnny Cash's nineteenthcentury cabin in my home state of Tennessee. I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, and if you thought I was crying when Johnny passed away, you should have seen me bawling when I saw how rundown this goddamn place was. I don't think the family had visited the dwelling since the Carter administration. I was thinking, \"Goddamn, how many crappy movies am I gonna have to do to pay for the repairs on this place\" And no disrespect to the estate either\u2014they told me what condition it was in, but I was so hellbent on owning Johnny Cash's cabin that I went ahead and bought it anyway. What a dick I am. But you know what, I'm still as happy as a cow walking in shit that I have it. It's kinda like catching herpes from Audrey Hepburn You're bummed about the herpes, but you're psyched you got them from her.\n\nI'd add to that, but really, could I do better\n\n!\n\n While filming The Dukes of Hazzard, Knoxville occasionally caught up with Sean Penn and Jude Law, who were in New Orleans making a film version of All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's classic novel about Louisiana politics. One night Penn called Knoxville and told him there was a special guest in town, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The gonzo journalist had long been one of Knoxville's heroes; years ago he sent Thompson a copy of his preJackass survival stunts and was stunned when he received an encouraging phone call in return. (Knoxville says there was a second encounter years later, at the Viper Room, when he was a little \"footloose and overzealous,\" and he suspects Thompson told his handlers to \"keep that guy away from me.\")\n\n Knoxville remembers the night in New Orleans fondly. The evening ended, he tells me, with the gang going back to Thompson's hotel suite and reading aloud passages from the Doctor's Hawaiian yarn, \"The Curse of Lono.\" \"A real nice moment,\" Knoxville says. \"Sometimes when you meet your heroes, you're bummed out, but I wasn't let down at all. He was better than I'd imagined.\"\n\nA few days later, Knoxville received a message from Thompson on his answering machine, which he tried his best to repeat for me in a scratchy Dr. Thompson voice\n\n\"Johnny, we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000\u2013candlepower illumination grenade. Big bright bastards, that's what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.\"\n\nSeveral weeks later, Thompson killed himself.\n\n!\n\n By now you know that, like his idols Hunter Thompson and Johnny Cash, Johnny Knoxville has a bit of a reputation for being a hellraiser. Not in the trashthehotelroom, throwthephoneattheconcierge sense, but in the mighthavesuchagoodtimeheforgetshiscreditcardatthebar sense. Knoxville calls this \"getting hot,\" as in \"I was pretty hot that night.\" It's just one of the many things he says that sound great coming out of his mouth but would sound really dumb coming out of yours.\n\n\"I can get hot pretty quick,\" Knoxville tells me. \"It's not a rare occurrence.\"\n\nFor the record, Knoxville is a confirmed drinker. As for drugs, he says he \"never liked coke\" because \"the first line's great, and then every line after, you just feel like shit. Plus, you can't fuck on it.\" I ask him if he'd ever tried heroin. \"Yeah\u2014it wasn't my bag,\" he says. \"Opiates make me puke.\u2026 Weed just makes me super fucking dizzy.\n\n\"I really love booze,\" Knoxville says. \"Whiskey...it's been very good for me.\"\n\nThe other reputation Knoxville has picked up, of course, is of being something of a playboy. A couple of days before we meet for the second time, there is a gossip item in the New York Post about Knoxville allegedly canoodling with supermodels Kate Moss and Bridget Hall, starlet Lindsay Lohan, and his Dukes costar Simpson. \"Johnny Knoxville just can't seem to shake his fastmushrooming reputation as a bold\u2013faced babe magnet,\" the item read.\n\nFor many men, this would not be considered unflattering news. But for Knoxville it is a little complicated, because he has been married for eight years to clothing designer Melanie Clapp, with whom he has a 10\u2013year\u2013old daughter, Madison. So reading rumors in the tabloids about how you're hooking up with Jessica Simpson isn't for him the thrill it might be for someone else. Especially considering that Simpson remains married to Nick Lachey and vehemently insists they're still a couple.\n\nStill, I ain't too proud to ask. And when I do, inside a little Cuban restaurant where the guy pressing sandwiches can probably hear us, Knoxville stiffens up a bit in his chair and says\u2026nothing happened.\n\n\"It's not true,\" he says. \"Jessica and I are just friends. She's a great girl and all that, but all the rumors\u2014I just kind of take it in stride. But it's kind of hurtful to the families that are involved.\"\n\nAnd the other ladies\n\n\"It's no secret that I go to bars,\" he says. \"And I've had drinks with all those girls. I guess they need something to print.\"\n\n Just this once, Knoxville sounds like he could be any other celebrity complaining about the press. And the truth is, I have no idea if he's being honest or coy. I don't know what it's like to have people write false things about me, or true things they still screw up somehow, and Knoxville briefly regales me with stories about some of the dirty tricks that have been played on him by tabloids hungering for dirt. But then something goes off inside Johnny Knoxville that reminds him that, though these stories are problematic and awkward and maybe even a little embarrassing, this is the life he has chosen, and things could be much worse.\n\n\"It's just one of those things,\" he says. \"I'm not going to fucking sit here and whine about it. I'm just telling you what it feels like. They could have me sleeping with Dom DeLuise!\" he adds, howling. \"Which would be fucking awesome, actually. Why don't you call a tabloid and tell them you saw me and Dom DeLuise canoodling\"\n\n!\n\n This is Johnny Knoxville right now. You should know that in our time together, he has been nice to all fans, tourists, waiters, and small pets. He has said nice things about everyone in his family and didn't trash any of his former costars, even though I tried to get him to. You should know that he talked articulately about Nabokov and Kerouac, and also that his friend Steve\u2013O delighted in making cryptic statements about him, like \"I'll just say that Johnny Knoxville is a very bad man.\" You should also know that Steve\u2013O added \"And I love him.\"\n\nYou should know that he may just become a really good actor, unless he gets eaten by a killer whale or falls down an open manhole or something. You should know that it's okay to think of him in things other than Jackass. You should know that, in total, he only drank three Stellas. And you should know that there will probably be more rumors about him. Because you should know that a couple of nights after we last met, I saw Johnny Knoxville canoodling with Dom DeLuise. I was a little hot that night, so my memory is foggy, but I think Johnny liked it.\n\nJason Gay is a GQ articles editor."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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