A morbid fear of dying somehow drove Jackass wildman Steve-O to performing risky stunts and three-day drug binges that left him “twitching and flopping around with his lips all blue”.
He traces his need to get peoples’ attention to his high-flying businessman dad and alcoholic mum, who for different reasons never had much time for him.
“I didn’t get much attention from my parents,””Steve-O says. “I was actually raised by live-in maids”.
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When one of his first girlfriends broke off their relationship, it sharpened young Stephen Gilchrist Glover’s urge to perform death-defying stunts. He said: “I wanted this this girl who had dumped me to to be worried that I would die”.
(Image: The Diary of A CEO/Youtube)
”I was jumping off rooftops into pools,” Steve-O told the Diary of a CEO podcast. In those pre-internet days he would record his stunts on a camcorder and send the tapes to the girl through the post.
“I believed that I was just gonna fail at life and die very young,” he says.
“I think that it heightened my my mortality issues, because even though I was young I think I was somehow angry at the idea of of death”
(Image: Jackass)
“My theory is that I was lashing out at death by climbing off of balconies and and just dangling from my hands off like 12 storeys and then letting go and dropping onto the balcony below.
“That was totally life-threatening,” he adds, “especially how intoxicated I was while doing that.
“I wanted that girl who dumped me to think I was gonna die… I was upset about mortality and and lashing out at it I was mocking death – taunting it”.
(Image: stevo/Youtube)
And as the success of Jackass grew, Steve-O also started indulging in drug binges that were even more dangerous than his on-screen stunts. “In 2007 I was renting four apartments in one building,” he recalls.
“One of them I just did demolished the walls and built a skate park throughout the whole apartment …there was like a Russian prostitute operation in the adjacent apartment so they weren’t going. to complain about the noise…”
“And then I had my apartment which was where all the really crazy stuff happened. That was that was just my little drug-den”.
(Image: Jackass)
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Steve-O would continuously inhale nitrous oxide capsules for the short-lived heart-racing high: “I would sit down with 600 cartridges of nitrous oxide and just inhale them,” he says.
“I would crack one fill that and inhale it with my lungs filled with nitrous oxide I would be busy filling up the next one so that when I exhaled the nitrous from the first I would then inhale just so I wasn’t breathing air …
“I was inhaling nitrous oxide to the exclusion of breathing air”.
(Image: Jackass)
“My goal at all times would be to lose consciousness,” he says. “If you do that and you hold your breath you you will become unconscious and you’re kind of twitching and flopping around and and your lips are all blue…
“It’s not not healthy. I would be doing that for days on end while snorting cocaine so it was on on like the second and and particularly on the third day of being awake on a cocaine binge while inhaling nothing but nitrous oxide that’s when the the most profound psychosis with all the hallucinating would be going on”.
Eventually his Jackass colleagues urged him to try rehab. “Even my hallucinations were telling me to get help” he joked at the time.
He’s now kicked the drugs, and the potentially deadly stunts, and is taking a very different kind of risk as a stand-up comic.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
