When he’s not onscreen with the Jackass crew rolling down slopes, being hit in the junk with various objects or attacked by enraged animals, Johnny Knoxville has had even less luck. The scattering of non-Jackass film roles he’s won have either been middling (Grand Theft Parsons) or dreadful (The Ringer). He’s hoping to change all that with a new project called First Man.
Paramount is also hoping it can change his fortunes in the fiction area, buying the rights to the pitch, and assigning writers Matt Spicer and Max Winkler to write the script around Knoxville.
He’ll play a hard-partying hellraiser who put his lifestyle on hold to help his politician wife get elected president. But once the couple is in the White House, their relationship shifts and he’s tempted back to his boozy, crazy ways.
It certainly sounds like something Knoxville can handle, while avoiding serious injury.
But he hasn’t forgotten his idiots-in-arms and is attached to star alongside stunt/prank-loving regulars Bam Margera and Ryan Dunn in Moustache Riders, which Paramount bought in 2008 and is busy re-working for the trio. It’ll see them as petty crooks that head out on an adventure with an old outlaw to hunt down treasure. And the grizzled veteran they’ll be appearing alongside? Knoxville’s old Dukes of Hazzard co-star Willie Nelson. We’re less thrilled about this one, mostly because anything that makes us think about the The Dukes of Hazzard is not a good idea…