“I thrive amongst the misfits,” Rachel Wolfson says.
It’s a warm May afternoon in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. The coffee shop where we’ve met is at a trailhead, and Wolfson, a comedian, podcaster, and the only female cast member of Jackass, stands out amid the groups of women in Lululemon wrangling kids with iPads and lemonades. She’s in tight black jeans and a leopard-print bra top, sipping black cold brew (“I choose violence,” she deadpanned to the barista taking her order), having expertly navigated kitten heels on an uneven dirt path to get to a picnic table where we can talk. She’s tall, lean, and tan, her dark brown hair in loose curls over her shoulders, décolletage adorned with a tangle of necklaces, a few delicate tattoos up her arms.
Wolfson, 39, is telling me why she has mixed feelings about the year she spent at a reform school in Provo, Utah, in the early 2000s. It was an intense experience, what she now sees as something like a training camp for good Mormon wives. She cried herself to sleep for four months when she got there at 17. But she wouldn’t be who she is today if she’d never had to deep-clean those dormitory carpets or perfect hospital corners, or if she’d never met the other girls who found themselves within those walls. After all, it led her to other groups of amazing misfits: California stoners, the L.A. comedy scene, and eventually, Jackass.
