Bam Margera is learning how to feel joy again
By Kirk McKeand
Bam Margera has had a rough time over the past decade. It's no secret. The professional skater turned to the bottle after his friend and Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn died in a car accident in 2011 at the age of 34, but he’s on the mend. Margera’s been sober now for a year, and he’s made his return to the public stage as an unlockable character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4.
Margera and Dunn were trailblazers who filmed themselves performing silly and daring stunts as part of the CKY crew, eventually inspiring director Jeff Tremaine to create Jackass, where they joined Johnny Knoxville, Steve O, and the rest of the crew to pull off even bigger and more stupid stunts for MTV viewers. It’s easy to forget now, but it all started with a skateboard.
“Skateboarding is my medication, and it's my therapy, too,” he tells me over Zoom, all smiles showing off his studded teeth, his eyes hidden behind polarised shades.
I’d be smiling too, if I were him. In 2013, a doctor told him he’d never skate again. He’s out there proving them wrong.
“The doctor looked at my legs and said that they were dry-rotted rubber bands from alcohol abuse,” Margera says. “Good luck trying to skate. And then when I reached down to touch my toes, my hamstring pulled, and I was out for a year. I lost hope from that, and I actually drank more because of it. I'm like, ‘Well, if I'm doomed, I'm doomed’.”
He credits his recovery to his wife, Dannii Marie, a stretch coach who convinced him to do stretching exercises for an hour per day and worked with him through his long physical recovery – a recovery that defied medical advice.
“My legs are 45 and they feel like they're 20 again,” Margera explains. “So my passion for skateboarding is back, and that's pretty much my main focus and goal. As soon as I wake up, I want to get a skate trick on film. Skateboarding got me to where I am. Doing it again, all these neat things are just falling into place.”
To get back to the halfpipe, first he had to get himself off the hamster wheel. Margera tells me he was in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest “Florida Shuffle”, which is where rehab centers exploit addicts for profit, using excuses to keep them in past the 90 days enforced on them in an intervention. As far as I can tell, no such Guinness World Record exists, but Margera says he was bounced around for “three years”.
“If you have good insurance, they'll find reasons to keep you there for eternity,” Margera says. “So 88 days would go by, and I'd be like, ‘I'm getting out in two days’. And then he'd walk in and he would be like, ‘You've been rocking those same pants for four days now, that's bad hygiene. You're doing another 90 days in another place’. It ended up costing $660,000.”
That wasn’t all it cost either. He was committed to rehabilitation for alcohol abuse and Adderall, which he had a prescription for, and when he left the facility, he came out of rehab on 18 different drugs.
“It led to stiff muscles, erectile dysfunction, hair loss, weight gain, suicidal tendencies, and I was getting all of those effects, and it was really bad,” Margera explains. “I couldn’t even cry. You’re just comfortably numb. And when I stopped taking it, I just realized that I don't need anything except skateboarding. A trick a day keeps the doctor away.”
Back in 2022, though, Margera couldn’t keep the doctors away. He was laid up in an ICU with a breathing tube down his throat after having four 20-minute-long seizures as a result of COVID, which he says hit him hard because he “was in really bad shape”. He was pronounced dead on December 8 that year, but he beat the reaper the same day, announcing on Steve-O’s podcast that he was revived on Elvis’s birthday (which is January 8th, but I’ll let him off).
That might go some way toward explaining why he’s sporting an Elvis comeback look in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 – leather jacket, leather trousers, coupled with a red button-down shirt similar to what he wore in Viva la Bam. He’s been through it, but it’s time for Bam’s comeback. Return of the King.
“I was like, ‘Man, if I don't change, I'm gonna die this way,’” Bam remembers thinking from the hospital bed. “I needed to make a drastic change. I just went in head first with sobriety, and as soon as I started losing some weight and started stretching, the muscle memory eventually came back to learning new skate tricks again.
“Did I go to hell and back? Absolutely. But there was a point in time you could have told me that Metallica is playing across the street, and I have VIP passes. And I'd say, ‘I don't feel like it. I've seen them before’. Everything made me bored. But when you get out of treatment after three years, everything becomes new and fun again. I'm in a convertible driving down the street with a pal listening to music. I'm at the beach having a coffee at a Starbucks outside. This is awesome. Everything became fun again. To be bored with everything because you've done everything, it’s a real problem.”
Margera didn’t have much in his early teens. Pretty much overnight, thanks to CKY, Jackass, skating, and brand deals, he could suddenly have anything he wanted. One Right Guard commercial netted him a million dollars for a day’s work. He lost complete touch with the value of a dollar because the numbers were so high they didn’t mean anything anymore. One day, he was driving a Lamborghini “like a mess” and someone asked him what he’d do if he wrecked it. His answer? “I’d just buy another.”
It’s always been a part of him, that recklessness. Born Brandon Cole Margera, he got the nickname “Bam” from his dad because at the age of three, he’d constantly run into the family’s couch and bounce away, or jump from the coffee table, always throwing himself in harm’s way to entertain an audience. His dad would shout “Bam Bam” when he’d do it, and now Margera wouldn’t even turn his head if someone called him by his birth name. His entire identity is self-inflicted pain.
During the early years at CKY, he did a segment with shopping trolleys where he and his friends pushed each other at speed into prickly bushes. An older woman walked over and asked them what the point of it was. “I'm like, ‘There is no point. It's dumb as hell,’” Margera laughs.
“Doing dumb stuff will never become unfunny. Does it make no sense? Does it have no point? It absolutely has no point. But if everybody behaved themselves and nobody did anything wrong, think about the chaos. There would be no more entertainment, no more news, no reason for jail anymore, because everybody's a goody two-shoe.”
Arguably, those early CKY segments were a precursor to modern YouTube, where pulling off silly pranks for money is now an entire industry. The world wouldn’t be the same without Margera and his friends sprinting full pelt and tipping each other into bushes. There certainly wouldn’t be a Jackass.
Unfortunately, Jackass is done and closed for Margera. Though he’s rebuilding bridges and rekindling his passion for everything that brought him to where he is today, repairing his relationships with the director Jeff Tremaine and co-star Johnny Knoxville isn’t likely.
“The damage has been done with that,” Margera says. “To put me away in treatment and make me pay for it, and then secretly be filming the movie behind Hollywood's back, my back, and doing it without me. Something that I invented, and I get replaced by a guy named Poopies… Ryan Dunn's rolling over in his grave right now, saying, ‘Why, Jeff? Why?’ It was supposed to be us reuniting as a tribute, to get the band back together and create a cool thing in memory of Ryan Dunn, and now, what is it? It's not the same anymore, and you couldn't offer me enough money to be a part of that again.
“It's one of those things. Some rock bands – like Axl and Slash with Guns and Roses – they have bumped heads so hard that they could never just shut up and get on stage again. It's the same situation. You have done so many things wrong that nobody has any idea about, that I had to deal with, and those experiences and memories are so bad that I cannot forgive.”
For now, Margera is happy with the wind in his face, legs that don’t snap, and a skateboard under his feet. He’s happy that he can be happy again.