Bam Margera is back on track. He has picked up the skateboard again, and he's doing tricks, returning to his roots and rekindling his love for the thing that got him where he is. The former "Jackass" star defied doctors after recovering his legs after his long stint in rehab, and now he's back to appear in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4.
We spoke to the CKY founder about life, skating, and hurting himself for our entertainment.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
McKeand: The doctor said your legs were too damaged to skate. How did that feel?
Bam Margera: In 2013, the doctor looked at my legs and said that they were dry-rotted rubber bands from alcohol abuse. Good luck trying to skate. And then when I reached down to touch my toes, my hamstring pulled, and I was out for a year. I lost hope from that, and I actually drank more because of it. I'm like, "Well, if I'm doomed, I'm doomed." And then I married a stretch coach, and we stretch for an hour a day. My legs are 45, and they feel like they're 20 again. So my passion for skateboarding is back, and that's pretty much my main focus and goal. As soon as I wake up, I want to get a skate trick on film. When you do what you love, and skateboarding got me to where I am, all these neat things are just falling into place.
It sounds like when you got told that, it sent you to a pretty dark place, but you're coming out the other end of it now, right?
Yes, and you know, not to mention, I was in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest Florida Shuffle. If you don't know what that means, but it means that if you get 5150'd [for involuntary psychiatric commitment] then you have to do 90 days. And if the intervention knows that you have good insurance, they'll find reasons to keep you there for eternity. So 88 days would go by, and I'd be like, "I'm getting out in two days." And then he'd walk in and he would be like, "You've been rocking those same pants for like, four days now." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm married. I'm not trying to get any action in here," if you know what I mean. He's like, "That's bad hygiene. You're doing another 90 days in another place."
And I kept doing that for about three years because they knew that they're making $1,300 a night off me, which ended up being $660,000. I went in on alcohol and Adderall, which I had a prescription to, and I came out on more drugs in the first f---ing place -- 18 different things that led to stiff muscles, erectile dysfunction, hair loss, weight gain, suicidal tendencies, and I was getting all of those effects, and it was really bad. And when I stopped taking it, I just realized that I don't need anything. Skateboarding is my medication, and it's my therapy too. I don't know how anybody can think that it's okay to be on 18 different things to the point where you can't even cry. You can't even have any emotions. You're just comfortably numb. Someone might say, "Bam, your cat died." I'd be like, "Oh, it did? Neat." A trick a day keeps the doctor away. I get up, go out, and do a skate trick. It keeps me sane.
What does appearing in the new game mean to you?
So the new game, I was kind of going for an Elvis Presley '68 comeback special look, with the leather jacket, leather pants, which honestly is really hard to skate in. Nobody did any skate tricks in leather pants. But anyway, that's the look I wanted to rock with a nice red button-down shirt, which was like the first look that I had on "Viva la Bam." I got that black jacket with the red thing going on. So I was kind of going for [an] old vibe like that, mixed with the Elvis '68 comeback special. And I'm really happy with the outcome. The Activision scanners are so high-tech now, I was actually in a globe filled with 167 cameras scanning me from head to toe, to the point where you can almost zoom in close enough to read the credit card information on my tattoo.
Is it real credit card information?
Yeah, I got all these kids buying stuff on the internet because they've read my code on the credit card code on my arm.
You almost missed a deadline to appear in the game, didn't you? What happened?
It's no secret that I didn't skate for 10 years, and I was a pretty hot mess. I just got really sick of that. It took three years of treatment. For eight days, I woke up on life support from five seizures, 20 minutes a piece, with a tube down my throat. I had COVID and pneumonia, and I was just in really poor shape. I was like, "Man, if I don't change, I'm gonna die this way. So I need to make a drastic change." I just went in head first with sobriety, and as soon as I started losing some weight and started stretching, the muscle memory eventually came back to learning new skate tricks again. They say everything happens for a reason. Did I go to hell and back? Absolutely.
But there was a point in time where, you know, I owned a nightclub for 10 years in Philadelphia. So you could have told me at one point that Metallica is playing across the street, and I have VIP passes for anybody I want to bring. And I'd say, I don't feel like it. I've already seen them before. I'm bored with that. Everything made me bored, but when you get out of treatment after three years, everything becomes new and fun again. I'm in a convertible driving down the street with a pal listening to music. I'm at the beach having a coffee at a Starbucks outside. This is awesome. Everything became fun again, and I really started to appreciate all the fun things that you can do. You know, to be bored with everything because you've done everything, it was a real problem.
Did that come from just having money out of nowhere?
To be broke as a joke at the age of 15 and then pretty much become an instant millionaire from the CKY videos, "Jackass," and all the skateboard sponsorships, and then the Tony Hawk video game, and then just random things, like doing a Right Guard commercial for a million dollars for one day of work -- that can really get to a kid's head, growing up with nothing, and all of a sudden you have something. I remember there was a point where I was driving the Lamborghini around, like a mess, and somebody was like, "What would you do if you wrecked that thing?" And I'm like, "I would just go get another one." The value of $1 didn't apply to me anymore. And it was a problem. You have $300,000 a week for 65 weeks for MTV budget for "Viva la Bam" to blow s--- up, fly people in, and fly people out ...
Your nickname comes from you running into walls as a kid, right?
I was jumping off coffee tables when I was three or four, and I'd run full speed into the couch. My dad kept saying, bam, bam. When I went to kindergarten, it just got shortened to Bam. And my real name is Brandon, but I mean, if you even said, "Hey, Brandon," I wouldn't even turn my head, because no one has ever called me that.
You've always been putting yourself in harm's way, if you think about it. Where do you think that comes from?
I remember, I was in a shopping cart getting pushed full speed into a pricker bush. And I was starting CKY and I was making a whole segment about shopping carts, shopping trolleys going into bushes. And I remember this one lady was just like, "What's the point of that? I don't get it." I'm like, "There is no point. It's dumb as hell." Hence the name "Jackass". Doing dumb stuff will never become unfunny. Does it make no sense? Does it have no point? It absolutely has no point. But you know, if everybody behaved themselves and nobody did anything wrong, think about the chaos that would create. Then there would be no more entertainment, no more news, no reason for jail anymore, because everybody's a goody two shoes.
I think CKY and Jackass influenced YouTube. I don't think YouTube, as it is, would exist without those.
You look at the CKY videos, and it's pretty much anything that you see on "Ridiculousness." It's from that. It's all these internet silly stunts and, you know, dumb, quick little slams from people falling down the stairs. I mean, that's what we did in CKY, and I really think that everything would be completely different if those videos didn't exist.
What's the scariest thing you've ever done?
The scariest thing I've ever done was probably get sabotaged into falling into that pit of 100 snakes. Because if I knew that that was going to happen in real life, I would have been on the first airplane out of there. I was thinking I was going to pull a rock on ["Jackass" co-creator Jeff] Tremaine because he's all vulnerable, sitting in a chair in the back of an 18-wheeler. Well, there's a hole in the 18-wheeler that I fell in and I could not get out. Me telling them that I'm terrified of snakes is basically just like saying, "Put snakes on Bam." But um, yeah, that was absolutely terrifying to the point where I cried, and if they hadn't brought me out of there within another minute, I probably would have, like, convulsed and fainted or something gnarly. It was complete panic.
Is there anything you've ever done that didn't go on video that you wish you'd filmed?
I mean, just random things. They built this real water slide on "Jackass" with a jump at the end that you've probably seen when we had the loop going on. But Danger Ehren [McGhehey, "Jackass" co-star] pushed me down the slide when it was all soapy. I went down on my feet first, and I tried to balance, because I wouldn't have done it if I didn't get pushed, but now I had to deal with it, so I just tried to balance it like I was on a skateboard, and when I hit that transition, I hit my head so hard that it was gushing blood. I jumped off the ramp with my bloody head, knocked out, and I fell into the pool, and it was just too dark of a thing to show. And I really wish that, like, dude, if I went through that, you got it on film, you better put it in a movie. But I think it's just too much of a liability, or, like, a depressing thing, rather than something funny. So things like that. You know, it really sucks to get really hurt and take one for the team, only for it to never be shown what kind of pain you just went through.
I feel like, with all the safety coordinators and stuff now, you wouldn't get away with that anymore.
You're right. You know, I mean, there were two things that we did with "Jackass." We did body bag at the dump, where we pulled up to a dumpster with people looking with secret cameras everywhere, and we got out like bandits. We had these fake crowbars made of like plastic, but they looked real, and we're totally hitting Ryan Dunn when he's all wrapped up in a body bag, and when we threw him into the dumpster, only to have strangers reveal that this guy is half dead when it was a joke all along. The police showed up and it was a big, big deal. And then when they found out that we were faking it for "Jackass," it became a real potential lawsuit.
Matter of fact, the same thing happened with Knoxville in Los Angeles. He thought it would be a funny idea to go to an Ace Hardware in a L.A. County Jail, full-orange body outfit with the handcuffs on. He goes into the hardware store and tries sawing off the handcuffs. So people call the police, saying this escapee from L.A. prison is now in Ace Hardware, trying to saw off his handcuffs. The police pulled up so fast that the lady forgot to put the car in park, and it drove up onto the curb, into a pole, and caused a lot of damage to the car. But, I mean, think about if [the officer] would have run some old lady over. It was such a big thing that we could never show this kind of stuff on air.