Knoxville raises heck in ‘Hazzard’

updated 3:15 p.m. ET Aug. 3, 2005

NEW YORK - This is not a story about drinking with Johnny Knoxville, something that’s been written so many times by now, it has practically become its own subgenre within the gonzo journalism canon.

Well, OK, the interview did take place at a bar, and alcohol was involved, including a round of tequila shots that Knoxville ordered and suggested drinking “stuntman”-style, which entails snorting the salt and squirting the lime juice in your eye.

That’s about what you’d expect from the guy who created “Jackass,” the MTV reality series that made self-induced pain not just acceptable but fashionable, and made the charismatic Phillip John Clapp from Knoxville, Tenn., an instant star.

Only he’s not that guy — not all the time. He looks like that guy, with the trademark smoked aviator sunglasses, faux-hawk hairstyle and facial scruff, the stylishly distressed denim button-down, cut-off pants and worn-out Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers.

But sitting down for a beer at a midtown Manhattan hotel bar, Knoxville is more Southern gentleman than jackass. The 34-year-old is unerringly polite, addressing a waiter as “sir” and his interviewer as “ma’am” in a low, slow voice with a slight twang that emerges now and again.

He speaks earnestly about the forces that shaped him growing up (the music of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the writing of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson) and those that influence him now (his wife, Melanie, and their 9-year-old daughter, Madison, whose name is tattooed over his heart).

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He’s also low-key on this afternoon as he prepares to leave New York — where he’s been bar-hopping nightly — for Atlanta, where his new movie, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” was to be shown for troops at a military base.

“It’s just such a good town. I always get sad when I leave,” Knoxville says. “I play really sad music all the way out to the airport — tons of outlaw country and western like Willie, Waylon, Johnny.”

(His iPod also contains entire sections of Broadway show tunes and Barbra Streisand songs. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

‘Funny Steve McQueen’
This combination of contradictions — the rowdy party boy coupled with the sensitive romantic — has prompted comparisons to a number of Hollywood icons.

“Dukes of Hazzard” director Jay Chandrasekhar likens Knoxville to Burt Reynolds, or a “funny Steve McQueen.” (The movie, by the way, which is a big-screen version of the ’80s TV series, essentially requires Knoxville as Luke Duke to ride shotgun while Seann William Scott’s Bo Duke stunt drives the General Lee. Both yell “yee-haw” a lot. Reynolds himself shows up as the villainous Boss Hogg.)

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