Steve-O on death, Oliver Tree, signs from above, and a recent near-fatal accident with his girlfriend

Jackass: The Best and Last is now in theaters, and HOLA! had the chance to catch up with the one and only Steve-O ahead of its release. When he saw two of his old mugshots as the Zoom background, he grinned as he pointed them out, explaining, “Those are my officially two drunkest mugshots." “I don’t say that proudly,” he assured. Now, 18 years sober, Steve-O is filled with philosophical ideas, stories about death, covered in silly tattoos, and rocking a mouth full of fake teeth.

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Steve-O became famous by making pain funny, danger entertaining, and recklessness feel almost superhuman. But after decades of pushing his body to the limit, now at 52, survival has taken on a deeper meaning.

That reality hit especially hard this month when he experienced what he called “maybe the closest I’ve ever come to death” during his first skydive out of a helicopter. His girlfriend, Koral Bickel, was with him, and he had a plan that only Steve-O could make simultaneously romantic and terrifying. “It was important to me that we get a photo linked up by our hands and kissing while free-falling," he said.

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Steve-O became fixated on getting the shot. “But I was unstable,” he recalled. “I wouldn’t let go of her. I was trying to stabilize to get this smooching photo.” But the altitude was "way too low to be doing that.” 

They were supposed to deploy their parachutes at 4,000 feet, but they didn’t pull until roughly 2,100. “That in and of itself… It’s not good,” he said. Because he had spent so much time trying to stabilize for the photo, they had no time left to safely separate. 

“I left absolutely no time for us to track away from each other,” he said. “So we both pulled immediately next to each other. You cannot pull your parachutes that close to each other.” A canopy collision could have killed both of them. “That’s the worst f**king thing I’ve done," he said.

When I asked if the moment brought them closer together, he said, “Well, yeah, given that it was 100% my fault." “It’s not something that we f**ked up together. It’s something where I badly put her life in jeopardy, as well as my own.”

Steve-O on fear, sobriety, and finding his voice

With Steve-O's career, fans would never use the word "fear" to describe him. Ironically, though, one of the most revealing parts of the conversation had nothing to do with physical danger.

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Steve-O has shared in the past that during Jackass 3D, after getting sober, he still hadn’t found his voice and was very afraid. “There was fear on multiple levels," he said when I asked him to elaborate.

At the time, he was less than two years sober. Sobriety, he explained, moves painfully slowly. “They even call it slowbriety," he said. “I think it’s pretty common for creative individuals getting sober to be confronted with a fear that they’re going to lose their creative identity, their creative mojo," he shared.

He found himself asking questions that cut to the core of who he was. “What will it be like if I’m sober? Am I still going to be able to operate in that creative way?”

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“There’s something about early sobriety that is very vulnerable. You feel like an exposed nerve," Steve-o continued. “I hadn’t found my voice. I wasn’t really confident. I didn’t know what I was.”

“I was afraid of the cameras in general," he said. “I was afraid of being on display. I was vulnerable. I was self-conscious. I was awkward.”

And when it came to the physical dangers, he said he "was terrified.” Yet somewhere between Jackass 3D and Jackass Forever, something changed. Over that decade-long stretch, he says life gradually softened him. “I blossomed into somebody comfortable in his own skin.”

Steve-O says his late mother still sends him signs

Along the way, Steve-O has experienced many losses, including Jackass' Ryan Dunn in 2011. In an old interview, Steve-O shared he believed that dying “has to be okay." When I asked if he's ever gotten a sign from a loved one that has let him know it's okay, he revealed, “I got a sign from my mom.”

His mother, Donna Gay Glover, died in November 2003, and for years, he and his sister didn’t know what to do with her ashes. They sat untouched in his sister's closet until years later, when his father visited a psychic.

“The psychic said to him, ‘Your first wife needs to be set free," Steve-O explained. The psychic had no way of knowing his father had a first wife, let alone that she had passed or that her ashes had never been scattered.

When his father told them, Steve-O and his sister spread their mother’s ashes at sea. Then came the sign - “When we got back to land after scattering her ashes at sea, my sister and I were driving home in two separate cars. And as we got on the highway, there were two rainbows.”

“I’ve never seen that in my life,” he said. “I’ve never seen complete full rainbows side by side. It was like one for me and one for my sister.” Now every rainbow carries meaning, especially when he's surfing. “Every time that I see a rainbow, particularly if I’m in the ocean, I take that as a sign from my mom.”

By that point, the conversation had moved far beyond Jackass, and Steve-O began speaking about death like a philosopher. “Not only does it have to be okay to be dead,” he said, “it’s impossible that anything could not be okay about it," he said. “We are the universe experiencing itself," he shared. “We are expressions of pure love, every single one of us. And as counterintuitive as that feels at times, it’s the reality.”

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“There’s no such thing as a drop of water ever not being the ocean. There’s no such thing as a wave ever not being the ocean. There’s no such thing as any of us not being God," he continued. “When they say you can’t bring anything with you when you die, that’s not true,” he said. “You bring every thought, word, and deed.”

Steve-O remembers Oliver Tree

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As Steve-O spoke about death, he was wearing a shirt covered in photos of Oliver Tree, an incredible singer and artist, and his friend, who passed away on June 14, 2026, in a helicopter accident in Brazil. When asked what made Tree so special, Steve-O began by dismantling the clichés people often rely on after someone dies.

“In general, whenever anybody dies, all of a sudden they lit up the room, they would give the shirt off their back to help another person," he said with a laugh. “It’s almost annoying how everyone’s so wonderful as soon as they die.”

Then his tone softened. “In the case of Oliver Tree, even in life, nobody was as enthusiastic for creative endeavors.” Steve-O described a friendship rooted in genuine care that existed far away from cameras, content, and public performance.

“We would get together with no cameras, no social media. He would just check on me, like, ‘Hey man, how you doing?’” Those moments became deeply personal. “We would open up to each other about like, ‘Man, my ticket sales are struggling,’ things like that. There was a really, really personal connection," he shared. 

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“It was all his initiative, too. All of his initiative to reach out and always stay in contact. The world lost a real, real treasure. It's touching. The outpouring of love for him goes beyond the cliche, 'he lit up the room.' Like a lot of people, really described what he was actually like, and he was beyond special," Steve-O added.

That loss clearly reshaped the way he thinks about legacy. When I asked beyond the stunts, the chaos, and the mythology of Jackass, how does Steve-O hope people remember him? His answer came quickly and with brutal honesty. “If I die right now, f**k, I’m just not as good a dude as Oliver was," he said. “I gotta really try to be a good… it doesn’t come so naturally to me.”

When he looks at his life in totality, he says he feels grateful for what he calls “the trajectory of improvement.” He translated that growth into, “I’m consistently less and less of a piece of s**t as I go.”

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