Jackass star Brandon “Bam” Margera has barely been on the line for 10 minutes when a male fan spots him in a Seattle parking lot and asks for a photo. “Dude, I fucking pulled up and I was like there’s no chance that’s Bam,” the fan exclaims. Margera poses for the picture — his wide smile revealing several silver-capped teeth, his broken thumb wrapped in a metal splint from a recent skateboarding injury — then gets back in the car. It’s a reminder that the daredevil continues to carry the kind of fame that few ever attain. “I can’t go one block down the street without taking 20 photos,” says Margera, 46, still flashing the mischievous grin that helped catapult his career more than two decades ago.
Margera appears in the new, and apparently final, Jackass movie, Jackass: Best and Last, but he isn’t really part of it. The movie serves both as a farewell to the franchise, and a reminder of how years of addiction, feuds and legal battles pushed Margera — who had second-billing for the first three films — to the sidelines. His involvement is mostly limited to a series of archival clips, including “the bull teeter-totter” — in which Margera was one of four to sit on a four-seater see-saw in a bull pen, trying to avoid the beast’s horns — and “high five” — in which an unsuspecting Margera was hit in the face by a spring-loaded giant hand, leaving him sprawled on the floor. There’s also a previously recorded scene in which he attempts to flee an escape room where a rattlesnake has been set loose, which was filmed in 2020, but he didn’t film new segments for the movie.
Despite since finding love again, to which he credits his sustained sobriety, along with a series of psychedelic trips and vomit-inducing rituals with the secretions of an Amazonian frog, he declined to attend the film’s premiere — still bruised by his acrimonious axing from the production of the previous film Jackass Forever.
“I’ll definitely check out the movie, and I hope it’s good, but as far as a reunion, it’s not going to happen, not in 10 million years,” says Margera, who has face tattoos, four nose rings, and a trimmed goatee. He’s also wearing oversized designer sunglasses with gold medallions at the hinges. “I don’t have any bad blood with the cast of Jackass,” he continues.“It’s just the decisions that Johnny Knoxville and [Jackass director] Jeff Tremaine decided to make. I never want to see them ever again in my life. Enough is enough.”
The roots of the fallout stretch back to 2019, before filming for the franchise’s fourth feature instalment began, when Margera signed a wellness agreement with the producers, which committed him to sobriety amid his struggles with alcoholism. To ensure he was maintaining his end of the bargain, he had to take breathalyser tests three times a day, urine tests twice a week, and have his hair follicles regularly screened, according to a subsequent lawsuit. “I already knew they were setting me up to fail,” he says.
In August of that year, he was kicked off a plane for allegedly being too drunk, but at times, Margera seemed intent on recovery, even appearing on The Dr. Phil Show and professing to be sober, only taking his prescription Adderall for ADHD. “I never drank until I was like 22,” he told the celebrity doctor. “Jackass is a one-take Jake. You’re on a roof with a shopping cart, and there’s a bush. You can’t land that, you’re going to eat shit no matter what. So give me a few shots of tequila. OK, I feel pretty numb. Shove me off the son of a bitch.”
Things started to seriously unravel a few months into filming for Jackass Forever in mid-2020. “They put me up at some shady hotel with a guy out front to make sure I didn’t leave to go get alcohol,” Margera says. “I wound up on set once, and they’re just like, ‘Piss into this cup.’”
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sobriety agreement ended in controversy. In August 2020, Paramount fired Margera after he was accused of taking unprescribed amphetamines, which he insisted were prescribed. “To tell somebody that after doing all that, thinking that you’re going to get $5 million, then say you’re not in the movie, and you’re not getting $5 million — I mean, I watched Dateline, and people kill other people for a whole lot less,” says Margera. “I was very fucking angry.” That anger curdled into a call for fans to boycott the movie, a lawsuit against Paramount, Knoxville, Tremaine, and others, alleging “inhumane” and “discriminatory” treatment over his Jackass Forever axing, as well as even attempting to get the movie cancelled, and alleged threats against Tremaine which led the director to win a restraining order against Margera, who said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder months prior.
In their response to Margera’s lawsuit, lawyers for Paramount wrote that they had tried to “help Margera by attempting to include him in the movie on the condition that he stay sober and take steps to save his own life…. Within a few months, the wheels came off, and Margera committed multiple breaches: He stopped regularly taking his mandatory alcohol tests, he broke off communications with his treatment team, he dodged a drug test, and he used illicit drugs again.” (The case was eventually settled. Paramount declined to comment for this story.)
Co-star Steven “Steve-O” Glover wrote on Instagram at the time: “Everyone bent over backwards to get you in the movie, and all you had to do was not get loaded. You’ve continued to get loaded, it’s that simple. We all love you every bit as much as we all say we do, but nobody who really loves you can enable or encourage you to stay sick.” In a recent interview, Knoxville said he understood why Margera had felt abandoned: “We did draw a hard line. And we did it out of, ‘This is our chance to really help him’ … As long as he’s thriving and he’s healthy, that’s all I care about. Selfishly, I would love him to be in my life again. But that’s on his own time.”
After leaving Jackass Forever, Margera’s life for the next two years was defined by a controversial conservatorship — that he says he was entered into against his will — with a woman who had developed a virtual reality and biofeedback regimen to treat addiction. This made him, as he puts it, “the Britney Spears of Jackass.” The story was featured in an episode of HBO Max’s The Curious Case Of… documentary series last year.
“This lady named Lima [Jevremovic] talked my parents into sending her $150,000, which pretty much gave her the funds to lock me up,” he says. “It was a really dark time, and I never want to think about her name again.” Jevremovic sued him for defamation in December but a judge threw out the case, citing that it hadn’t been filed in the correct jurisdiction. (Jevremovic’s company Autonomous User Rehabilitation Agent did not return a call. She did not respond to a request for comment via her Instagram.) Margera ended up doing two and a half years in rehab after being caught in what is known as “the Florida shuffle” in which some treatment centres are alleged to keep insured patients in a constant cycle of rehab.
“I was in 13 different treatment centres, 90 days apiece, back to back, and they put me on 18 different pills, which led to weight gain, stiff muscles, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and suicidal tendencies. I couldn’t even cry or cum,” says Margera. The sum of money his insurance racked up, Margera claims, amounted to “the funny number” of $666,000. “I felt completely hopeless and defeated. Any little thing that I did would just lock me up for another 90 days.” At the same time his bank account “pretty much dwindled down to close to nothing” amid a custody battle with his then-wife Nikki Boyd, and the lawsuit against Paramount and his former Jackass co-stars.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW MARGERA ENDED UP caught in the Florida shuffle and then praying for his life in a hospital bed, you have to go back to the beginning. Long before YouTube, TikTok, and Mr Beast, there was Margera. Before everything was “content,” there were grainy VHS tapes of an anarchic teenage prankster from West Chester, Pennsylvania, skateboarding on freight trains, destroying rental cars, and attacking his long-suffering dad Phil in slapping fits.
It wasn’t called creating content back then. Margera was just making skate videos interspersed with funny moments, which itself was pioneering, with his CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) crew. The fast-paced, dopamine-fuelled formula — with a cast of recurring characters shepherded by a charismatic ringleader, escalating stunts, and the sense that viewers were watching an authentic group of friends — would become the blueprint that many on the internet later followed.
The CKY videos were instrumental in laying the foundations for Jackass, which exploded onto MTV in 2000 and turned skateboarding’s enfant terrible into one of the few skateboarders to ever become a genuine household name. In a whirlwind rise to stardom, 2002’s Jackass: The Movie led to his own show Viva La Bam, which aired on MTV from 2003 to 2005. Over five seasons, Margera took his antics across the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Europe, convinced almost his entire town not to feed his dad, Phil, reenacted the civil war with 200 soldiers, clung to a hot-air balloon as it lifted into the sky, and turned his family home into a skatepark.
At Margera’s peak he was starring in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, appearing in commercials for Right Guard, driving luxury cars, and living the sort of jetset life that seemed unimaginable for someone who had dropped out of school on the first day of 10th grade. Jackass Number Two was released in 2006. While they were filming, Margera spent a night in jail. “I got arrested for having brass knuckles at the LAX airport, drunk as hell, and I got a felony charge,” he says. His co-stars, Margera claims, “high-fived me for good press.”
The run-up to his first marriage was then the subject of MTV series Bam’s Unholy Union in 2007, and Iggy Pop played at the wedding party in Philadelphia before the newlyweds honeymooned in Dubai. Sipping champagne on camera in a penthouse hotel suite, the unlikely countercultural icon was in his imperial era.
“You know, I’m stoked when kids say I watched your CKY video, but mums at Comic Con will say, ‘I just want to know, my son got hurt imitating you,’” says Margera. “I’m like, ‘Well, I got hurt imitating me. What do you want me to say?’ I broke every bone in my body more than once. But yeah, it’s rad, you know. A lot of people, they all say now, Bam was YouTube before YouTube.”
But the same fame that made Margera rich slowly unmoored him. He woke up one day and felt like he had nothing left to strive for. “I was looking out of my driveway staring at a purple Lamborghini, a blue Lamborghini, a red Ferrari, a Porsche Panamera Silver, a black Audi R8, two Bentleys, two Range Rovers, two Hummers, a 1928 Mercedes, and a fucking DeLorean, and I’m like, I have run out of wishes and goals, I have nothing more to prove to anybody,” he recalls.
Despite the 2010 box office success ofJackass 3D, his spiral was worsened by the death of his best friend and Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn in a car crash the following year. “I started to drink to forget,” he says. “I never stepped on a skateboard for literally 10 years.” He would “wake up throwing up barf and bile and crack open a beer just to cure the hangover, and then continue to do that all day … It was so bad that I didn’t think that I could stop anymore.”
During that time, up until his ill-fated involvement in Jackass Forever, he hosted Bam’s Bad Ass Game Show for a season on TBS, toured extensively as vocalist with his band Fuckface Unstoppable, and continued to orbit the celebrity world. His son Phoenix was born in 2017. “Everybody’s like, because you [tormented] your dad, Phoenix is gonna do that to you, and I’m totally cool with that,” he says. “Phoenix made me fight for myself to save my own life because I need to be here for him.”
Conventional rehab wasn’t the only thing Margera tried, either. In December 2020, shortly after the movie dispute erupted, he took a series of psychedelic trips that he believes were a key part of his healing journey — even if he relapsed afterwards. He did seven ceremonies in Escondido with a man he calls ‘the shaman wizard’, consuming psilohuasca — a combination of psilocybin mushrooms and harmala, which is part of the ayahuasca brew. “You go through every single emotion at one point or another during the ceremony. You just think about the spider web of events that led to my downfall, and you get really depressed, and then you get really happy again, and then you just kind of figure out who you actually are. It helped me extremely.”
He also tried kambo, a poisonous frog secretion known for its apparently detoxifying, vomit-inducing effects. “Your face puffs up like a big red football, and you barf out every tar and toxin known to man,” Margera says.
WHETHER COINCIDENCE, FATE, OR UNANSWERED prayer, months after he survived the seizures, pneumonia, and Covid, Margera walked to the pool bar at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles and ordered a Bloody Mary. By then he was divorced from Boyd and, there, in June 2023, he overheard a woman who caught his attention. “I instantly heard this girl, ‘Listen, I’m 43 Sicilian and Irish. I was born in Jersey.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m 43, I’m Sicilian and Irish. I was born in Philly, over the bridge [from New Jersey], who the hell is that?’” he recalls. “And I see the hottest ass chick, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck? I gotta go talk to her.’”
Dannii Marie, a tall brunette, told him she was a stretch coach, and they hit it off. Soon, she invited him to walk her dog with her. “I was like, ‘What kind of dog do you have? She said, ‘A tan pit bull. Why?’ And I said, ‘Thank you, God.’”
In October of that year he was down on one knee, and by May 2024 they were married. Reading his vows, Margera credited her as being instrumental in him finally getting sober and being able to reach his previous heights on a skateboard thanks to her stretching regimen.
He was with Dannii Marie at a restaurant in Ocala, Florida, last year when The Curious Case of… Bam Margera premiered on Investigation Discovery. “I was like, ‘What the fuck, I never approved this, turn this shit up!’” he recalls. “Luckily, it pretty much exposed how fucked up it was of Lima becoming my guardian without my permission or consent.”
Now, the man who built a career manufacturing everyday chaos is attempting something more difficult than any stunt he ever filmed: figuring out how to be happy without drink, drugs, and drama.
“It hasn’t been easy,” he says, “but I just know that boredom is my trigger, and whenever I got bored, I would look across the street and see an Irish pub, and be like, that looks like fun, and I would do it all day long.” Now that’s not in the equation, he focuses on filling his absent moments with skating, like he used to before he became too famous to visit skateparks in Pennsylvania without getting mobbed. He’s in the process of filming a documentary series for Red Bull’s Skate Tales series across the U.S., showing him skating at an elite level once more. “Skateboarding is my therapy, my sanity, my medication,” he says. “The weight loss has happened, the muscle memory is back, and I’m actually learning and inventing new tricks at the age of 46. All I want to do now is skateboard.”
From Rolling Stone US
