Meet the safety supervisor who tries to make sure the Jackass cast doesn't kill themselves on set
Charlie Grisham on the balance between acceptable and deadly idiocy in Jackass Forever
Some gigs are more difficult than others. Take, for instance, a film safety supervisor who gets a contract overseeing mild action scenes in a largely dialog-focused drama. Now consider someone with the same job who’s tasked with keeping a group of endearing knuckleheads from dying terrible deaths while trying to entertain the world by horribly injuring themselves.
Vice spoke to Jackass Forever stunt coordinator Charlie Grisham, a man who worked the latter gig and whose role on the film was, as the article puts it, “trying to make everything [Johnny] Knoxville and his buddies did safer without actually making it safe.”
This sort of work entails him being around “for 90 percent of everything they shoot,” even if the crew is filming something that isn’t “really a stunt-y scene.” (The exception to this, apparently, is that Grisham “tries to run the other way when the penises come out,” as they do.)
As the article’s intro aptly puts it, Grisham is tasked with a constant dilemma. “If he doesn’t go far enough in protecting these guys from themselves, he could literally have blood on his hands,” it states. “But if he takes too much of an edge off their stunts, he could spoil the whole enterprise.”