Jackass hurt Bam Margera, physically and emotionally

Though some archival footage of Bam Margera will appear in the next Jackass movie, the former stunt professional wants "nothing" to do with the series.

By Matt Schimkowitz | January 15, 2026 | 8:00pm

Screenshot: YouTube

Film News Bam Margera

Jackass hurt Bam Margera, physically and emotionally

It’s been a long, hard road for Bam Margera, the skater-turned-stuntman from MTV’s Jackass. Aside from the injuries that build up from working on the pain-forward series, Margera also survived serious drug addiction, the death of his best friend and fellow Jackass star Ryan Dunn, and the prolonged legal battle with Jackass co-creators Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville. Though there have been attempts at reconciliation, things only seemed to get worse between Margera and Tremaine and Knoxville, who attempted to include Margera in 2022’s Jackass Forever. However, Margera’s participation was contingent on his sobriety, and when he admitted to breaking that part of the contract, he was fired. Things got uglier from there, with Tremaine filing a restraining order against Margera, who began harassing Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville online. Considering all that went down, it’s a bit surprising that Knoxville and Tremaine would want to include Margera, via archival footage, in the upcoming Jackass movie. What’s unsurprising, given the last decade of his relationship with the franchise, is that Bam Margera wants “nothing to do with” Jackass these days.

Accosted by TMZ on the street, Margera does not seem, in any way, at peace with his former castmates. “If you had a laundry list of the chain of horrible events of the two years of COVID that they put me through, spending my own money at an alarming rate for therapists, doctors, and treatment, and all this, only to sit me down and tell me, ‘You’re not in the movie, and you’re not getting $5 million,'” Margera said. “I watch Dateline, and people kill other people for a whole lot less.”

“People kill other people for less” is not a phrase you want to hear from a co-worker. Still, Margera says that he has “a lot of PTSD” from the experience and that wearing the badge of ‌”ex-Jackass star” is hard enough to live with. “The humiliation, the abandonment, and just embarrassment of it all, I had to let it go[…]I’m just too hurt by it, and I already accepted the fact that I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. I was very angry, and now I’m not angry, I’m just hurt. And as of now, I don’t even want to think about reuniting with anybody.”

As for the archival footage, Margera says the Jackass crew asked him about including some old clips, and he gave them a “hell yeah.” “I remember filming so much funny shit that never made it to the movie, simply because it would be too long or it was just too gnarly,” he continued. “I said have at it, so as far as I know, I don’t have to film anything new and don’t want to.”

Margera says that he’s just happy to be skating again. His wife is a “stretch coach” who helped him get his “legs back to being 20.” The Jackass life is indeed a painful one. Hopefully, one day, all the boys can get together and shove fireworks up their asses again.

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