Mr Jackass makes sport of Special Olympics

Johnny Knoxville as Jeffy, the would-be Olympian.

For many people, the idea of a movie about a normal guy pretending to be intellectually challenged in order to fix the Special Olympics might sound like a bad joke.

It's probably not surprising that to Johnny Knoxville, it sounded like a hilarious one.

Lured in by Ricky Blitt's script and the presence of the Farrelly brothers (There's Something About Mary) on the production team, Knoxville seems to have been particularly moved by the chance to work with his co-stars, a mixture of character actors, real Special Olympians and developmentally challenged thespians.

"I'd never been around mentally challenged people before and I'd missed out on that whole world and God... I've been with John [Taylor] and Eddie [Barbanell] a lot lately and, I dunno, we have a ball," Knoxville says.

"I showed the Jackass guys the movie and now they're open to that world."

On the Ringer set, when he wasn't pulling his standard pranks - an incident involving a cattle prod is mentioned by actors and producers alike - Knoxville was stretching his performing muscles to create Jeffy, the special alter-ego crafted by his character Steve, a cubicle drone whose Olympic motives are confusingly altruistic.

"Basically, I didn't want to be hard to watch, you know?" he says.

"And wanted to keep it light. Steve is a good guy, he's just not very quick and I don't think he'd be that great an actor, so Jeffy would fall in and out of character and go over-the-top sometimes. I wasn't trying to do Dustin Hoffman doing Rainman. Steve is not capable of that."

Knoxville scoffs at the idea that a correlation might exist between the complicated stunts of Jackass and the physical prowess necessary to pretend to be competing in the Special Olympics.

"On Jackass there's no athleticism required," he says. "You just have to fail doing your stunts on Jackass. If you did a stunt and you landed it, it's like 'Do it again until you fail'. In the movie, it's the opposite.

"Stuntmen on movies are insanely skilled and trained in a number of areas and... yeah... I love the stunt guys."

Knoxville says that the film's subject matter never offended him. Looking over the actor's resume, it seems hard to imagine anything disgusting him, but Knoxville begs to differ.

"I've walked out of movies. I can't take certain things. I know it's all set up, but... I walked out of Leaving Las Vegas during the rape scene with the guys hitting the girl, I'm like, 'Oh, I don't want to see that.' Anything with women or children in jeopardy...Nah. I don't like that."

The past year has been a busy one for Knoxville with a slew of films ranging from Lords of Dogtown to The Dukes of Hazzard to Daltry Calhoun and John Madden's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot.


On screen

Who: Johnny Knoxville
What: The Ringer
When & where: Opens Thursday

- NZPA