If you’ve noticed Steve-O getting up to various hijinks in recent months, it’s because the Jackass alum has been filming a wild collection of stunts to be featured in his upcoming live tour, The Super Dummy Tour. But as he tells Consequence in a recent interview, one of his toughest experiences came about because of a stunt that didn’t happen — his plan to get breast implants for a short period of time.
It nearly happened, to be clear. “I got within 10 hours of being in surgery for that,” he says. “The surgery was supposed to happen at eight in the morning. And 10:00 PM the night before, I got a call that the anesthesiologist backed out of it, because he found out that it was me doing it as a stunt. And that kind of set off a chain reaction where the doctor didn’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they were having trouble finding another surgery center to to make it happen.”
At that time, he says, this was just seen as a setback, and the idea wasn’t dead yet. “They were talking about going to a different county and smuggling me in at six in the morning and urging me to say that it happened in Mexico.”
But then, he believes, fate intervened. “On the day that the scheduled surgery was supposed to happen, I was checking out at the supermarket. And the person ringing up my groceries was evidently transgender, and it struck me as a sign from the universe. So I asked the transgender person if I could run something by them, and I had a conversation with this person that had a profound impact on me.”
Prior to then, Steve-O hadn’t felt he needed to run the idea by anyone because “I knew what my motivation was, I knew what my intention was, and it wasn’t to be hurtful to anybody. I was just trying to get laughs. I had done a bunch of workshop shows to test out material, and I had a number of trans people come to me after the shows to voice support for [the stunt]. And I think some people would’ve been okay with it, and some people wouldn’t have. It would’ve been a mixed bag.”
However, he confirms that before the scheduled surgery date, “I didn’t really have any dedicated meetings or conversations with trans people, because I didn’t really feel that I had to. But I just feel like the universe put this encounter before me, and ultimately I decided that the universe had intervened.”
Here’s one of the bits that Steve-O had planned to do after getting breast implants, that he felt was going to be “really funny”: “It involved me getting my whole body waxed, with airbrushing to remove all of my tattoos, and I lost literally 20 pounds to get really slender and petite. So I would be hairless, tattooless, with a pink bikini top and Daisy Duke shorts, and a motorcycle helmet covering my entire face and head.”
In that ensemble, he says, “I would ride a pink Vespa around at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally completely in disguise, where nobody could tell who I was. And the plan I had was to film with hidden cameras as I rode up to big gangs of motorcycle riders, who would presumably be checking me out. And I would walk up to pull off my helmet and say, ‘Yeah, dude,’ and get this crazy reaction, which, predictably, would be contentious.”
The person Steve-O spoke with said that “my feeling that it was the ultimate statement of body autonomy, me saying my body, my choice… That part was okay. But the part where I deliberately went out to trick people into thinking that I was a woman and then fooling them, and then kind of celebrating the idea of hate towards [trans people] — that was a thing.”
Additionally, the person Steve-O spoke with “described how they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom at their place of work, that there were like maybe 28 states in the country that would arrest them for having an ID that said female on it. That there were politicians making concerted efforts to lock them up in internment camps. It was really pretty heartbreaking, the level of oppression that was described.”
So, Steve-O says, “framed like that, I thought about it in a way that I hadn’t before, where you know, wow, maybe it’s not all fun and games. Especially the pranks. Like, I would’ve considered it to be better footage if I was to be beaten up at the motorcycle rally. And just having that mentality was very flawed, because ultimately it would be an exercise in celebrating violence against trans people. At least, it would be interpreted that way by some, and when it was put to me that way, I thought, wow, maybe I missed the mark on that one.”
In addition to the motorcycle rally stunt, Steve-O says he had plans “for hidden camera pranks in strip clubs as well. And I took my pole dancing training like remarkably seriously. I was doing some seriously inverted pole dancing acrobatics.”
Footage of his pole dancing training will be featured in the tour, along with footage from his doctor’s office — “there’s some pretty shocking stuff,” he says. And he will explain to audiences why he ended up not going through with it: “I don’t really avoid the topic — I explain that I felt the universe intervened on my behalf.”
While he seems at peace with the decision to not do the stunt, Steve-O does admit that “it was difficult for me. Looking back on it, I’m extremely grateful that it didn’t happen. I’m really glad that I didn’t go through with it. But that didn’t make it any easier, because I was so vocal about my plans to do that, and I’ve never been the kind of artist to say I was going to do something and then not do it. That was what I had trouble with, was not honoring my word.”
That said, he continues, he does feel that the stunt not happening “is a good thing. The show still has a bunch of really good comedy from that whole episode. And the extent to which I was prepared to go through with that is hilarious in its own right.”
Continues Steve-O, “I think it’s a very valuable trait to be able to admit when you’ve got things wrong.”
To learn about the tour, including when it might be coming to your city, go to Steve-O’s official site. For more on what you can expect to see during the upcoming Super Dummy Tour, read more here.
