Meet the safety supervisor who tries to make sure the Jackass cast doesn't kill themselves on set

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.”

To walk this tightrope, he may very occasionally put a stop to certain stunts that could kill someone. More often, though, Grisham suggests tweaks that may still make a super dangerous concept entertaining but not outright deadly.

For Jackass Forever, he mentions overseeing a few particularly dangerous scenes, such as a credits sequence “waterski-jetpack deal” stunt, one where the cast dresses like a marching band and then jumps onto a treadmill, and Johnny Knoxville getting tossed around by a bull (“With live animals,” Grisham says, “it’s literally a flip of the coin”).

“Eighty to ninety percent of the time, it is so much fun,” Grisham says of the job. “But then there are the four, five, six times during the movie where it’s not fun for me, like the day with the bull. Those days are very, very, very stressful.”

For more insight into Grisham’s work—and to realize how much stress he dodged when 85 year-old Bruce Dern couldn’t be included in the movie—read the full interview at Vice.

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