The duke of hazards

"Hey, can we open the minibar?" yells Johnny Knoxville, surveying his palatial suite at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons as if searching out the location of the liquor cabinet among the faux Regency furniture. "It's cocktail time!" It's 11.30am and the attendant gaggle of PR flunkies are looking slightly nervous. "Whaddaya want, vodka tonic? Bloody Mary?" he hollers, unperturbed. "It's a Bloody Mary morning," he sings. "Seriously, can we get in the minibar?"

It's hard to tell whether Knoxville is serious here - no drinks are forthcoming, if that's any clue. Then again, it's hard to tell whether he is being serious at the best of times. The 34-year-old actor, who this month stars as Luke Duke in the big-screen adaptation of Seventies TV fave The Dukes Of Hazzard, has founded an increasingly lucrative career on being relentlessly, recklessly un-serious.

Asked whether his Deep South roots (Knoxville is a self-proclaimed backwoods boy from Tennessee) and exuberant charm qualified him for his stint as a Duke Boy, he replies: "No, I had a lot of trouble playing a womanising drunk. There was a lot of preparation. I had to hire an acting coach, bartenders and several women of the night. But I found it in me somewhere."

Although he attended the American Academy Of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, California, Knoxville's route to movie stardom could hardly have been less conventional - or more painful. In the late Nineties, while writing for a skateboard magazine called Big Brother, he wrote a piece on protective gear.

Casting himself as the guinea pig, he had the magazine's editor film him putting various shin guards, knee pads and helmets through their paces. Naturally, this involved lots of falling down and hurting himself. The footage was so hilarious that, on the strength of it, he was offered a TV show, the remit being to inflict as much humiliating damage on himself and a group of equally demented friends as possible.

Jackass first aired on MTV in 2000. In the course of its phenomenally successful run, Knoxville shot himself in the chest with a .38 revolver ("I was just praying the bulletproof vest would hold up," he says. "I bought it off the internet. It was the cheapest one they had"); pepper-sprayed himself in the face ("It was like someone setting your eyes on fire and putting it out with gasoline") and took a punch from a professional heavyweight boxer, which resulted in a large scar on his forehead.

During the making of 2002's Jackass: The Movie, he was knocked unconscious three times.

The pain paid off. Jackass proclaimed him official court jester to the post-slacker generation. It's a role that his motley attire of rolled-up carpenter jeans, high-decibel shirt and indescribably silly cap suggests he is reluctant to let slip, even when the onerous task of promoting a movie is thrust upon him.

Nevertheless, it also earned him a shot at the big time - supporting roles in movies such as Coyote Ugly, Men In Black II and Walking Tall. Right now, with his star turn opposite Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson in Dukes, the forthcoming Farrelly Brothers' comedy The Ringer and several in-the-pipeline projects, Knoxville is emerging as a bona fide leading man in his own right.

Given that his career stems from little more than arsing around with his mates in various life-threatening ways, it would be easy to imagine that Knoxville's rapid ascent up the Tinseltown totem pole has gone to his head. There's no evidence of that today.

He is unceasingly funny, loudly profane and takes himself even less seriously than he takes everything else. "I'm a born motormouth," he blurts at one point. "Just could never shut up. That's from trying to get a word in edgeways around my house. My father was always getting the laughs and I guess I was just trying to emulate that. Hopefully, I bring my mildly amusing sense of humour to all I do."