J
ackass star Brandon “Bam” Margera has barely been on the line for 10 minutes when a male fan spots him in a Seattle parking lot and asks for a photo. “Dude, I fucking pulled up and I was like there’s no chance that’s Bam,” the fan exclaims. Margera poses for the picture — his wide smile revealing several silver-capped teeth, his broken thumb wrapped in a metal splint from a recent skateboarding injury — then gets back in the car. It’s a reminder that the daredevil continues to carry the kind of fame that few ever attain. “I can’t go one block down the street without taking 20 photos,” says Margera, 46, still flashing the mischievous grin that helped catapult his career more than two decades ago.
Margera appears in the new, and apparently final, Jackass movie, Jackass: Best and Last, but he isn’t really part of it. The movie serves both as a farewell to the franchise, and a reminder of how years of addiction, feuds and legal battles pushed Margera — who had second-billing for the first three films — to the sidelines. His involvement is mostly limited to a series of archival clips, including “the bull teeter-totter” — in which Margera was one of four to sit on a four-seater see-saw in a bull pen, trying to avoid the beast’s horns — and “high five” — in which an unsuspecting Margera was hit in the face by a spring-loaded giant hand, leaving him sprawled on the floor. There’s also a previously-recorded scene in which he attempts to flee an escape room where a rattlesnake has been set loose, which was filmed in 2020, but he didn’t film new segments for the movie.
