Johnny Knoxville: Rude, crude, and misconstrued

LOS ANGELES -- Johnny Knoxville isn't quite the jackass his early MTV antics would have you believe. Off camera, he's more gentleman than jerk. He doesn't skip a please, doesn't drop a thank you. Of course, that doesn't make him take-him-home-to-mom material.

Southern manners aside, the man who made his name performing outrageous, often painful stunts still has his wild-child moments.

There was the time six months or so ago, for instance, when he and his equally drunk cousin were in an Austin, Texas, bar discussing comic Richard Pryor and his old bits about boxer Leon Spinks. Let Knoxville tell it:

“I just thought it would be a good idea to get a Leon on my arm. I was half in the bag. I knew I wouldn't remember the next day, so I wrote on my arm, 'Get a tattoo of Leon Spinks on left bicep.' I woke up the next day, looked at my arm, and thought, 'Great idea!'”

And there it is on his left bicep, a tattoo of Spinks resembling a sphinx that is so ugly the 33-year-old Knoxville has to have regrets. Only he doesn't. Then again, Knoxville doesn't seem to regret much, except maybe having created a fan base that sometimes menaces him in bars with lighted cigarettes. He's got the burn scars to prove it. For the record, he does wish they'd stop already; on tour in Europe for the movie "Jackass," the culmination of his short-lived TV show, he says he had to hire security guards because young men kept picking fights with him, three in the first four days alone. Otherwise he tends to travel sans entou rage, showing up alone for a long lunch on the patio of the swank Chateau Marmont hotel, a regular if weird Johnny stunned to find himself costarring in the new John Waters movie.

"A Dirty Shame," which opened Friday, is so over-the-top even for its writer/director that it doesn't stretch Knoxville much as an actor -- and he wants to be taken as seriously as the next small-town charmer made good in Hollywood. He plays Ray-Ray Perkins, a tow-truck driver who also leads a band of "sex addicts" set on overpowering the neighborhood "neuters." Imagine the oddest peccadilloes imaginable and an enormous serpent in Knoxville's pants (literally), not to mention Tracey Ullman tearing at her Spandex wardrobe and Selma Blair with prosthetic breasts that would be back-breaking if they weren't constructed of latex foam.

Knoxville, seen most recently in "Walking Tall" opposite the Rock, is impossibly proud of his part in the movie, as well as of the movie, made by someone who shares his taste for the outlandish.

"We sit down to lunch, " Knoxville said, recalling his first meeting with Waters, "and he pulls out all these fetish magazines. He tells me all about the movie. I just can't believe I'm sitting there with John Waters. I'm a huge fan."

Knoxville says the only two people who should never see "A Dirty Shame" are his mother and his 8 1/2-year-old daughter, who, Knoxville said, "knows daddy and his friends were in the TV for a while doing silly things."

His desire to spare his daughter his raunchier side ("No string bikinis, no Daisy Dukes, unless of course they're my Daisy Dukes," he jokes) doesn't surprise costar Selma Blair, who considers herself a good friend and huge fan of Knoxville's. No shrinking violet herself -- in character as an ultra-chesty stripper she flashed a construction crew, only to be disappointed to realize they considered her deformed rather than desirable -- Blair credits Knoxville with getting her the part in the first place. She mentioned to Knoxville that she wanted to work with Waters, too, and the next thing she knew, she was.

"This movie is an easy transition for him; he fits into the John Waters subculture so well," Blair said by telephone from New York. "It's up to him to [expletive] it up now or not."

Blair openly adores Knoxville, eccentricities and all. In one breath, she calls him a consummate southern gentleman who's so handsome it's hard to believe what a rascal he is. In the next, she mentions that most people know him from stunts such as sitting in a portable potty covered in excrement. She sounds impressed.

"Johnny's done an amazing thing for himself: He's set the bar for bad behavior so high that if he acts up, no one notices," Blair said. "I think it's funny how huge his presence is [for "Jackass" fans]. I can't imagine how great the legions will be after [`A Dirty Shame']."

Hard-earned notoriety aside, Knoxville is in fact a family man who talks up his working-class mom and dad and adores his older sisters. They're still in Tennessee, which he fled after high school by promising his parents he would attend an acting academy in Pasadena, Calif. He didn't last the six-week course, thus starting a string of part-time odd jobs. He casually mentions that when his then-girlfriend, now wife, got pregnant, it jump-started his career in a roundabout way. After years of waiting tables and umpiring Little League games for $20 a pop on weekends, he buckled down and started writing for magazines, which rolled into participatory journalism, which turned into the hit show "Jackass."

But Knoxville walked away after nine months, tired of the pressure from outraged adults to tone it down, sorry he wasn't having much fun anymore. Although there are plenty of stunts still in the can, he says the movie was his last stand as a public "Jackass." Now he wants to be taken seriously as an actor who also does comedies. He had parts in "Men in Black 2" and "Coyote Ugly." He just completed the latest film from the Farrelly brothers, "The Ringer." Next up is "The Secret Life of Daltry Calhoun," about a troubled businessman who reconnects with the daughter he hasn't seen since her infancy. Quentin Tarantino will produce.

Still, Knoxville's mild manners and weighty aspirations belie his presentation of himself, which is laid back even by LA's three-day-old-stubble standards. His white T-shirt is so dingy it might at last be yellow rather than yellowing. The way his hair stands up would do a rooster proud. His nails are bitten to the point where there is nothing left to nibble. Of course he needs a shave and to have those sideburns trimmed. But somehow the look works. Knoxville -- who obviously adopted that moniker en route to stardom -- both fits in and stands out -- he's in La-La Land but not of it. Fourteen years after he arrived, the son of a homemaker and a retired tire-company owner can't quite believe he's here at all.

"South Knoxville, where I'm from, is a very small area," Knoxville said. "I mean to say I've been lucky, to say the least. My family is thrilled. So am I. If I stop to think about it, it would really get to me. But I just try to pretend it's all normal -- the money, the notoriety, all of it -- and keep moving forward. Otherwise I'd never be able to get anything done."

No overnight success, Knoxville hopes his hard-core fans, the ones who buy him shots in bars and get angry when he stops at four, will follow him as he takes advantage of the opportunities finally being presented to him. He notes that he never hits them back and never ever burns them, so he figures they owe him something, even if he did start the cycle with his own bad behavior. But he also knows they are often disappointed to learn he's rather relaxed in real life. He reads books and the newspaper, too.

Maybe it will help them to know he's not done with bars. ("Now, that's a hobby.") Tattoos, either. ("Oh, there's plenty of space.") And how about pranks like putting a toy car up someone's behind and sending him to an unknowing doctor for X-rays, his all-time favorite and featured in the movie "Jackass"? The thought still brings a smile of utter satisfaction to his face.

Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.