Knoxville raises heck in ‘Hazzard’

“I wanted this movie to feel as much as possible like a cousin of ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ and Burt Reynolds had that sort of rakish good looks, he did his own stunts, he considered himself sort of a ladies’ man,” Chandrasekhar said. “I feel like Knoxville has a number of those qualities. He’s done so much really funny stuff, he’s Southern, he’s got a certain toughness to him.”

John Waters, who directed Knoxville last year in the sex comedy “A Dirty Shame” — and with whom he shares an appreciation for humor that pushes boundaries — described Knoxville as both “a movie star and a great actor,” and expects that he’ll carve out an eclectic career similar to Johnny Depp.

“He’s also someone who men and women are instantly fond of him,” Waters said by phone from his summer home in Provincetown, Mass. “He’s the cutest, funniest boy that you would meet in real life. He can certainly act but he’s a real person, someone that every time you know you’re going to have fun when you go out with him.”

Knoxville’s acting coach in Los Angeles, meanwhile, sees similarities to Jack Nicholson.

“They’re both inappropriate men who are honest about themselves, and that’s extraordinarily appealing,” said Cameron Thor, whose clients include Sharon Stone, Drew Carey and Cameron Diaz.

Knoxville’s reactions to such comparisons?

“Wow,” he says, taken aback. “That’s a really cool thing to say. I mean, God, if I get one-fortieth of the way there, I’ll be all right.”

Humble beginnings
The son of a tire company owner and a homemaker, with sisters eight and 10 years older than him, Knoxville jokes that he knew he wanted to be an actor when he was about 13 because it sounded like a job with the least amount of work involved.

“If I’d known about producing then, maybe I would have gone into that because there’s no work involved,” he says.

What inspired him to move to Hollywood after graduating from high school — and leave the town for which he’d ultimately name himself while writing freelance magazine articles — was a copy of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” which his cousin, country singer-songwriter Roger Alan Wade, gave him at age 14. The location for this momentous event: a bar, which Knoxville had entered with a fake ID.

“I didn’t know people lived like that or thought like that, and maybe there was something else to do,” he says. “Everyone where I’m from pretty much stayed in their own hometown.”

“Jackass,” which made Knoxville famous in his hometown and far beyond, came about by accident. He’d planned to try out self-defense equipment on himself — pepper spray, a Taser, etc. — then write about the experience. His editor, Jeff Tremaine, suggested videotaping the stunt. A phenomenon was born. Skateboarding mishaps, intentional paper cuts, nipple-biting baby alligators — name it, and Knoxville and his buddies did it, both on the TV series, which ran from 2000-2002, and “Jackass: The Movie,” which Tremaine directed.

All that fun was not without consequence. Several kids copied some of the more daring, dangerous pranks and injured themselves, even though MTV issued warnings not to try these stunts at home and aired episodes late at night.

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