Back in July, Jackass star Steve-O made the hardly surprising declaration that he was going to get breast implants. (For the bit, of course.) However, it's a rare stunt that he didn't actually end up going through with, and the prankster has now explained why.
In a new interview with Consequence, Steve-O explained that he felt like "the universe" didn't want him to get breast implants. But the intervention came at the last minute: "I got within 10 hours of being in surgery for that," he said of the procedure. "The surgery was supposed to happen at 8 in the morning. And 10 p.m. the night before, I got a call that the anesthesiologist backed out of it, because he found out that it was me doing it as a stunt. And that kind of set off a chain reaction where the doctor didn't want to be associated with it anymore, and they were having trouble finding another surgery centre to make it happen."
At the time, that was merely a brief setback in his plan. "They were talking about going to a different county and smuggling me in at 6 in the morning and urging me to say that it happened in Mexico," Steve-O told the publication. He went so far as to get a new surgery date, but things once again did not align in favour of him getting the procedure.
"On the day that the scheduled surgery was supposed to happen, I was checking out at the supermarket," he explained. "And the person ringing up my groceries was evidently transgender, and it struck me as a sign from the universe. So I asked the transgender person if I could run something by them, and I had a conversation with this person that had a profound impact on me."
The prankster said that, prior to this chance encounter, he hadn't felt the need to run the idea by anyone. "I knew what my motivation was, I knew what my intention was, and it wasn't to be hurtful to anybody," he recalled. "I was just trying to get laughs. I had done a bunch of workshop shows to test out material, and I had a number of trans people come to me after the shows to voice support for [the stunt]. And I think some people would've been okay with it, and some people wouldn't have. It would've been a mixed bag."
"I didn't really have any dedicated meetings or conversations with trans people, because I didn't really feel that I had to," Steve-O concluded. "But I just feel like the universe put this encounter before me, and ultimately I decided that the universe had intervened."
Apparently, the person he spoke with was okay with the concept as "the ultimate statement of body autonomy," according to the prankster. "But the part where I deliberately went out to trick people into thinking that I was a woman and then fooling them, and then kind of celebrating the idea of hate towards [trans people] — that was a thing."
The person described to Steve-O how they weren't allowed to use the bathroom at their workplace, and "that there were like maybe 28 states in the country that would arrest them for having an ID that said female on it. That there were politicians making concerted efforts to lock them up in internment camps," he remembered. "It was really pretty heartbreaking, the level of oppression that was described."
"Framed like that, I thought about it in a way that I hadn't before, where you know, wow, maybe it's not all fun and games," Steve-O concluded. "When it was put to me that way, I thought, wow, maybe I missed the mark on that one."