{alltv} 'Jackass' Steve-O did it all for a girl

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The following interview with Steve-O was conducted the week before Ryan Dunn's death.

TORONTO - There are a lot of reasons Johnny Knoxville's merry band of idiots became Jackasses. But for Steve-O, the decision to put himself through poo torpedoes and butt chugs started because of a girl.

That's right. His obsession with near-suicidal pranks was set in motion by a girl who told him he'd never amount to much.

He was also motivated, eerily enough, by a desire to escape death.

Steve-O (aka Stephen Glover) was a 19-year-old student at the University of Miami when his stuntman urge kicked in, he writes in a new tell-all memoir, "Professional Idiot."

"The first thing that I learned there was that I didn't seem to be cut out for getting passing grades," he told QMI Agency in an interview earlier this month. "I was really just excited in jumping off diving boards and riding my skateboard."

He was popular among his classmates, he says, but his girlfriend at the time was less than impressed.

"She told me that she looked into her future and couldn't see me in it," he revealed. "She saw I was going to become a loser and she dumped me."

Steve-O, the member of the Jackass crew who routinely draws the short straw for the grossest stunts, was heartbroken. The pain caused him to alter his hobby of jumping off diving boards into something far more dangerous — throwing himself off apartment buildings into shallow pools.

"I was genuinely trying to shock this girl and make her worry that I was going to die. I was making skateboard videos in high school and people would say, 'That's cool.' But when this girl broke my heart and I started filming myself dangling from 12th floor balconies, the difference in the reactions I'd get were shockingly different.

"When I noticed how people reacted to me diving off apartment buildings into shallow pools and repelling off buildings all drunk, I knew I was on to something. I knew that this was my calling. And really, I just wanted to prove myself to that girl.

"Her calling me a loser was a big deal for me. She lit a fire under my ass."

It didn't take long for a prestigious skateboarding magazine, Big Brother, to take notice of Steve-O. He then scored a spot in Ringling Brothers Clown College but never joined the troup. He also got work on a cruise ship, but his act was, well, not entirely of the PG-13 variety.

After barely making ends meet during the '90s, Steve-O caught a break in 2000 when he was invited to film stunts for MTV's "Jackass."

"Soon as 'Jackass' came out, I went on tour and it was like a rock concert without the music," he said as a gaggle of girls, far too young to be watching Steve-O's scrotum stapling act, came over to pledge their affection. "It was just sex, drugs and crazy stunts.

"I was a kid who wanted to live a life of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll and when the opportunity to live my life like that came my way, I started abusing it from day one."

But like all wild parties, it eventually had to end.

"I never looked past the career," he said. "I never thought about what would happen when I wasn't a big deal. I never thought about what would happen when I was past the peak. I never thought about being on the decline. I never considered obscurity. And when that happened, I fell apart."

He slipped into an endless spiral of drug and alcohol abuse, which Steve-O painfully rehashes in his new memoir. He finally got clean following an intervention by Knoxville and other friends in 2008.

"This book is not about making me look cool," he says. "Drugs and alcohol took me to a place where I was so nasty and mean-spirited."

It was after a stint in rehab and a second trip to a psychiatric ward that the gross-out funnyman knew that he wanted to reinvent himself.

"I always figured I would go die," he admitted candidly. "I felt like it was inevitable that I was going to fail in life and die young. So I was frantically scrambling to document my stunts and pack my message into a bottle. I thought maybe I could be discovered after I'd died like Van Gogh."

Even after he achieved fame, his pseudo death wish fueled his antics.

"We're consciously aware that the only real guarantee in life is that we're going to die … I felt like regardless of what happened I was going to be dead, but this video footage would live on."

But after years of staring death in the face, and laughing about it, when it came time for a third "Jackass" film last year, he was dreading it.

"That dread was so raw and so intense on Jackass 3D. I was hating it. But it really was crucial to me to prove that sobriety didn't rob me of my stupidity and sense of humour. I was older, clear-headed and eager to prove that I could still do it."