“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.
On June 26, the Jackass crew, led by the inimitable Johnny Knoxville, released its fifth — and supposedly final — feature movie, Jackass: Best and Last. “It’s a combination of the best-of, mixed in with some new stunts,” Wolfson says. “But really, I look at it as a love letter to Jackass. I cried [during] filming, I cried after. Just processing everything. Because the end of this franchise represents, to me, almost an ending of my childhood.”
A former bucktoothed tomboy and self-described “detention kid” from a strict family of Las Vegas lawyers, Wolfson says her only “outlet to culture” was MTV. Now, she’s part of the club. “One of my favorite moments of my life — a lot of favorite moments of my life have come from Jackass,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes. “But [it was when] I heard Knoxville for the last time say, ‘Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass.’”
When Jackass premiered on MTV in 2000, it was an instant hit, combining the stars of the popular CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) skateboarding videos — known for their dangerous stunts — with a prank show. Wolfson was 13 at the time, the prime demographic. She loved watching Knoxville, Steve-O, and the rest of the boys launch themselves down hills in shopping carts, slam each other in the dick, or trick one another into wreaking general havoc. “Watching people get hurt is a release for me,” she says. “I just think it’s so funny.”
Wolfson and her friends would try the stunts at home, stealing shopping carts to push each other into curbs. “I tried to do a prank on my teacher,” she says, describing how she walked into class with underwear on her head and air-humped her teacher, doing her a take on the infamous Party Boy sketch. “It didn’t really hit with [the teacher],” Wolfson admits. “It was the first time I bombed.”
Her parents were also not amused. As high school was coming to a close, they didn’t know what to do with her. She had low self-esteem and had been sneaking out of the house; her friends were applying to college, but that didn’t seem like her path. That’s how she ended up in Provo. “I left my life, what I knew as my life, and I was in this reality, which I had never been in,” she says. “I had to earn everything: phone calls to my parents, going outside.” But the upshot was that she started writing every day in a diary, which she’s recently begun revisiting. “That notebook saved my life,” she says. “There’s moments where I’m so hurt there. I feel so abandoned, rejected, and I just have to get it out in my notebook.”
“I was so low I called my mom one day like, ‘I’m looking into assisted suicide.’ That’s where my mind was.”
Wolfson isn’t shy about her struggles. She was diagnosed with ADHD at five, she tells me, and put on Ritalin. Later, while attending college (she would eventually attend three different schools, earning a master’s degree in marketing from Lynn University in Florida) she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. “I’ve been in [Dialectical Behavioral Therapy], in and out, and at one point I was self-harming. I was hitting myself,” she says. “I remember I was so low, I called my mom one day, and I was like, ‘I’m looking into assisted suicide.’ That’s where my mind was.” Comedy has helped her confront her biggest anxieties, namely rejection and abandonment: “That,” she says, “is so much of what you deal with in stand-up.”
WOLFSON GOT HER START in comedy in the mid-2010s, when she was a bartender at the Hollywood Improv. She was already making a name for herself creating cannabis-oriented memes that were essentially one-liners (“420, what’s your emergency?”). Bartenders weren’t allowed to leave their post to perform, but she figured out a workaround to hone her stand-up at work. “I’d be pouring drinks, and they were passing the microphone [to me] for the open mic,” she explains. “Everyone had their backs [to me], no one would hear me.” But she was learning.
By 2020, Wolfson was building a reputation in comedy. She’d recently gone viral for a bit she’d clipped from a set and put on Instagram: “My mom was the judge who put O.J. in prison,” she says in it. “So basically, O.J. Simpson got sent to prison by the same woman who sent me to my room. But we both got out.” (Her mom, Jackie Glass, was, in fact, the judge who put O.J. Simpson away in 2008 for armed robbery.) One afternoon, Wolfson was going through her DMs and saw a note from Knoxville: “Hey, what’s your number? I want to ask you about something.” She was skeptical, but the account was verified with a blue check mark. “He calls me, and it’s really him on the phone,” she says. “I was like, this doesn’t seem real.”
Knoxville was vague, but said he was putting something together for the 20th anniversary of Jackass, and would she like to talk about being involved? “I went in for a meeting soon after, and the meeting was like five minutes — clearly we all have ADHD, because it was just like, ‘Would you want to come play with us?’” Next thing she knows, she’s going in for a test shoot. “I didn’t know I was auditioning, essentially — this is my first real Hollywood experience. So I came in for, like, a two-day test shoot, and then they kept contacting me to come back.”
In all, Jackass brought on five new members that season. At first, Wolfson wasn’t sure what they saw in her. She’d been an athlete, but “not an established stunt [performer],” as she puts it. Knoxville, it turned out, was on the hunt for a woman to join the crew. Though plenty of women work for the Jackass operation, there had only been one who had been part of a stunt — Stephanie Hodge, who was hurt so badly during a filming in 2001 that it never made it to air. After that, Knoxville maintained that women getting hurt wasn’t funny. But that was two decades earlier, and times had changed. He needed a girl to round out the new recruits, and Wolfson, with her one-of-the-boys attitude and deep knowledge of the franchise, fit the bill. Knoxville, for his part, told Rolling Stone earlier this year that it was her chutzpah that impressed him. “We do things with her which the rest of the guys would scream over,” he said. “But she’s just like, ‘Eh.’ She’s just a little tougher than us, is what I’m saying.”
The project turned out to be a movie, which would come out in 2022 as Jackass Forever. It was filmed over several months, with the cast pitching new bits during Zoom meetings, and Wolfson periodically traveling from Austin, where she was living at the time, to L.A., where Jackass films. Wolfson said yes to everything that they asked her to do, most of which was being part of the “peanut gallery,” but also included two physical stunts: licking a Taser while dressed as a mime, under strict orders to not make a sound; and getting “scorpion Botox,” i.e., having a scorpion sting her lips until they began to swell. She would have done more, she says, but Jeff Tremaine, Jackass’ co-creator and producer, would sometimes steer her away from stunts she might not be a good fit for. (As she puts it, the film was “very dick-heavy.”) “I don’t have, really, a line [I wouldn’t cross] with them, because I still trust them immediately with my life,” she says. “It’s weird to say out loud: ‘I trust Johnny Knoxville with my life.’ I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing.”
One idea she pitched, called Zach Sashimi, made it into the outtake film Jackass 4.5. In it, pieces of raw fish are put in the cracks, crevices, and folds of the skin of Zach Holmes, another of the new cast members, who is a large man. (This is Jackass. You know where they put it.) He is then covered in plastic wrap and left to bake in the sun; afterward, the other cast members feed him the fish. “It was voted somewhere [to be] one of the grossest pieces of cinema in history, ever,” she says proudly. “Yeah, I wrote that bit.”
When Jackass Forever came out, Wolfson took her parents to the premiere. They had initially been apprehensive about her new gig — “My mom had the worst anxiety after the first day,” she told Knoxville in a piece for Interview in 2022. “She called me as soon as I left the set like, ‘What happened? Are you OK? Did they put anything up your butt?’” But they came around when they saw the joy it brought their elder daughter. Sure, she hadn’t gone to law school like her little sister — who has since herself become a judge — but at least she was excelling in her chosen profession. “My dad, afterwards, he was like, ‘I liked it, kept my attention the whole time, I didn’t fall asleep,’” she says. “So that was a win for me.” (Her father, it should be noted, is Steven B. Wolfson, the current District Attorney of Las Vegas.)
“I don’t have a line I wouldn’t cross with them. I trust Johnny Knoxville with my life.”
Not everyone had such a warm reaction to Wolfson’s addition to Jackass; inevitably, after the movie came out, the misogynist trolls started to comment. “I’m gonna regret saying this, but I’m the Che Diaz of Jackass,” she jokes, referring to the divisive nonbinary character played by Sara Ramirez in the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That…. She understood where the fans were coming from — having a new crop of comedians in an established ensemble could feel like messing with perfection. “I was like, ‘I need to prove myself,’ but then I thought back and I was like, ‘How could I even prove myself when they’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve only been a part for the last few years?” she says. “I sometimes will get caught up in how the fans feel, because I’m a fan first.”
WOLFSON CAN’T SAY WHICH, if any, of her stunts made it into Best and Last, because when we talk, she still hasn’t seen the final cut. She tells me cursory details about one bit they filmed, wherein she and Sean “Poopies” McInerney, another newer member of the cast, are put into a single wetsuit, with Wolfson as the “big spoon.” (He immediately farted — “I felt like I was marked by Poopies,” she jokes.) They were then put on a balance beam on the side of a hill, which they of course fell off of, with McInerney landing on top of her. “And then we do it again. Poopies falls off, lands on my back, and I hit my head,” she says. “At this point, it’s like, we got the humor. We don’t need to keep [going].” She came out of the ordeal intact but with a bruised rib.
Worse than the actual injury, though, was the fact that it got her cut from another stunt she’d been preparing for. Knoxville had asked Wolfson if she’d like to be in a recreation of “The High Five,” a bit from 2010’s Jackass 3D in which a giant hand slapped cast members to the ground. But her injury made that impossible. “I went to Knoxville, and I told him how much it meant to me that he was going to let me do something like that,” she says. “I understood in that moment, not being able to do the hand was more painful than anything.”
A couple weeks after our coffee among the L.A. moms, we meet up at a bar in Highland Park, a trendy but quiet neighborhood on the city’s east side. She’s performing here tonight as part of the Popular Kids’ Club, a roving comedy night that showcases a mix of big and smaller names. Before her set, she sits in the backyard, rolling a blunt. A few years ago, she decided to stop smoking weed in order to clear her head. She picked up alcohol and cigarettes as a substitute, and, about a year into the switch, found herself doing shots with some family members at her grandfather’s funeral. “I was like, I don’t like this,” she remembers. “I don’t like who I am. This is not what I want to be.” Not long after, she went back to smoking weed. “I felt like way more myself,” she says. “And I saw the creativity coming back.” (She is getting ready to launch her own cannabis line with her friend Olivia Sawyer, of the brand Kush Queen.)
These days, Wolfson is in better shape, both mentally and physically, than she has been in a long time. She’s newly single, and in the process of moving back to L.A. “People are like, ‘She’s on Ozempic,’” she says. “And it’s like, no, I’m not. I came off birth control, I quit drinking — I look up to Steve-O for that.” (Steve-O, who was known for early stunts like getting an IV drip of vodka, got sober in 2008.) “I found the right medication that works for me. I go to therapy. I lift weights.” This kind of balance has brought her a new mental clarity. “For years I’ve had this, almost like, demon living in my mind. They talk about it — the evil roommate. And in the last couple years I don’t even hear that voice anymore. All I hear inside my brain is like my own best friend. Just someone who’s soft and soothing.”
Jackass, too, has helped Wolfson process some of her complicated emotions. The franchise may be coming to an end, but the support system she found with this new chosen family is going strong. After the first film came out, she stayed in touch not just with the new crew — Zach and Poopies and Dark Shark and Jasper — but with a handful of the old-timers as well, like Preston Lacy, Dave England, and Ehren McGhehey. “When Steve-O comes to Austin, I’ve opened for him. I always try to make a point to see him,” she says. “I just cherish any time I get, because when I’m with them, I’ll get stories, and I can ask them anything. I don’t know if they understand how much that means to me.”
With Jackass coming to an end, Wolfson is reexamining her experiences at reform school, trying to figure out if she can turn the pain into something positive. So far, she’s recorded an episode of her podcast, Rachel Interrupted, with her friend and former Provo classmate, Amanda Phaelen. But working it into her stand-up is still out of reach — at least for now.
When Wolfson takes the stage, she starts with some crowd work, asking one of the dozen or so people in the audience what he does. When he says he works for a junior college, she pretends not to really know what that is, before admitting that she, too, went to one. I think for a second that she might use this as a way in to talk about how she got there — after the Provo school, she spent a couple years at a small college in Vermont that specialized in working with students with learning disabilities — but she quickly pivots away, sticking to safer subjects like casual slurs people use in Texas, trans kids, and perimenopause. But the wheels are turning. Someday, hopefully soon, confronting this past will be less painful than a bruised rib.
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