Bam Margera considers his decision to stop drinking the most positively impactful one he’s ever made, candidly recalling in a new interview that he’s been able to bounce back despite having effectively “destroyed” his body with drugs and alcohol.
Speaking with Living Proof Radio about everything from the earliest days of his superstardom to his current sobriety-focused lifestyle, the 46-year-old skateboarder and Jackass franchise alum minced no words when looking back on just how hopeless his struggles left him feeling at various points in his life.
“I mean, looking back, if I had to do things differently, I probably wouldn’t have gotten shitfaced for a fucking decade straight and cracked the same jokes at the same fucking Irish pub with the same people,” Margera said in the extended, freewheeling conversation.
In the moment, Margera added, he thought he was having “a good time,” though the subsequent damage led to him thinking otherwise.
“I’ve realized how much time that I've lost,” he said, adding that a doctor once told him his legs were akin to “dry-rotted rubber bands” due to alcohol abuse.
“I knew that, like, I have destroyed my body from drugs and alcohol, and I don’t even know if this is gonna come back,” he recalled of this wakeup call, though he was quick to note that this particular revelation didn’t stick, at least not permanently.
Elaborating further on what he believes led to him embracing drugs and alcohol to the degree to which he did, Margera described himself as a “late bloomer,” due in part to spending his younger years sober and focused solely on skating. Later in life, he found himself at a loss when it came to setting new goals for himself, leading to him shifting his focus to getting “fucked up.”
At one particularly low moment, Margera was inspired to temporarily hit the pause button by something a convenience store worker told him. At the time, Margera was living in the Baltic region and had been visiting the same store on a daily basis to buy vodka.
“I remember, he’s like, ‘Bam, you know a lot of people kill themselves this way whether they want to or not. … This is how a lot of people go, and I do not want to see that with you,’” he recalled, noting that he initially responded to this advice by more or less shrugging it off, though the remarks stuck with him for the rest of the day.
“I’m like, I gotta change,” Margera remembered telling himself at the time, though it would take another personal revelation for him to fully shift into the sobriety-focused mindset from which he’s now benefiting.
The “last straw” for Margera, as he detailed in the video above, was experiencing five seizures in a row, then waking up eight days later in a hospital to find that he was unable to breathe on his own.
Margera has consistently been candid when discussing these struggles in recent years, including in connection with his firing from Jackass Forever, released in 2022. Though this led to legal action from Margera, he can be seen in archival footage included in Jackass: Best and Last, the newest film in the franchise.
Intended to be the final Jackass theatrical title, the film hit theaters earlier this month, marking the presumed end of a wildly influential chapter of American pop culture.
