Steve-O has been making people laugh for a while by acting like a...well, a jackass. His claim to fame is wearing leopard print G-strings while doing some crazy sh*t either on Jackass or WildBoyz (his show with Chris Pontius.) Little did we know he was actually in the middle of a downward spiral during all this, and on the heels of his MTV special coming out (it debuted last night) Steve-O: Demise and Rise, he sat down for an interview with our friends at Inside/TV to discuss what it was like to hit rock bottom and ask for help.
Did your time on Dancing help you feel like you're back? Um ... eh ... it made me feel good to get that much support from the fans. That was really, really awesome. As far as "I'm back!," I don't know if I really felt that comfortable about all that, but it was awesome. I'm a horrible dancer [laughs] and I stayed in the competition for six weeks ... that's hilarious.
What can you tell us about this documentary you shot for MTV? It's a very graphic documentary about my descent into madness and drugs and addiction. I guess everyone kind of considers it to be like a public service announcement that might help people. If that's the case, then that's cool with me ... [laughs] ... it's just a really graphic, gnarly documentary, and it is what it is. I feel like when I was getting loaded, I would watch that Intervention show, and I would just be comforted that the people on that show had bigger problems than I did. Now, I think this puts me right up there with them. [Laughs]
So what was the turning point for you, that made you decide to get clean? When I first decided to really give sobriety a true shot, I was motivated by the idea of being like a role model and doing a lot of good in the world. That was kind of the wrong approach to it, and it took me a while to realize that I needed to be getting sober for myself so I wouldn't have to be this jerk that I'd been in the past. So, I don't know how I feel about being a role model character -- I just don't want to be a jerk, and that's my motivation for staying sober.
At your lowest point, how bad did things get for you? I was nuts. I got really far outta my mind. At the when I was filming all this crazy stuff, when I was doing drugs, I thought everything was just genius! It took me kind of a while to realize that stuff wasn't that cool. I filmed a lot of it -- when I say I was pretty far out of my mind, I was hearing voices in my head and I was seeing people that weren't there. Really, just crazy auditory, visual, tactile hallucinations. I was in complete psychosis. It's pretty disturbing footage. To watch that seems like it would deter me from wanting to get loaded again, but that's not how it works. I watched it once and it just triggered me to want to get high. So it's not a good idea for me to watch it ... anybody that really cares about me, it's a tough watch. There's a lot of footage of me doing drugs -- I never was a shooter upper. I was a swallower, a snorter, a huffer and a smoker -- not a shooter. I had boundaries. I was kind of a garbage can, but I never smoked crack, and I never did heroin -- and, although I never turned it down, I never really went out to go find crystal meth. [Laughs] So yeah, I had boundaries.
So are you at the point now where you can watch this and be OK, or is it too much? This documentary feels to me like it's more likely to get me loaded than keep me sober, so I'm just kinda holding onto my support system and working to get through this. I think that what we've done, together with MTV, is provided some sensational programming to entertain people, because they love seeing other people suffer. [Like Jackass], I can't imagine that it wouldn't have a pretty major warning on there. [Laughs] When this documentary airs, you can trust that I'll be tuned in to Tough Love on VH1. [Laughs]
