Fear Factor: House of Fear host Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass fame, is a man who has willingly endured ramming by a bull, stood behind a jet engine just to test the force and volunteered to get bit by an anaconda that was slithering around in a child ballpit. He revealed during the Deadline Contenders TV panel for the hit Fox show what scared him the most about hosting season 1.
“Oh my God — snakes, fine; spiders, fine. I don’t care about heights. But the communal bathrooms in the house, it gives me anxiety. I don’t want to live with 14 people and have to share a bathroom. I’ll go out in the woods before I’ll do that. That gives me real fear. I don’t want to share a bathroom.”
The revamped, reimagined series wasn’t solely focused on wild stunts, there also was an added element where all contestants lived together in a home, and apparently all shared one bathroom. That made the season all the more challenging as this time around the winner needed to manage more than just their own fears to win — they had a whole social life to create and manipulate with their fellow contestants through alliances and betrayals, as competitors also voted each other off this season.
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The challenges did not disappoint either, with producers doing seemingly everything they could to make everyone’s worst nightmares a reality. Contestants were buried alive, shocked with electricity, left to escape a box of alligator gars, had to jump between moving semi-trucks. And of course it wouldn’t be Fear Factor if contestants weren’t incentivized to ingest something so vile they surely paid a visit to their gastroenterologist — and therapist — as soon as they left set.
It seems that Knoxville was most impacted by this new social element of the show.
“I watched these reality shows where something happens and someone on the show starts crying. I’m like, ‘Please, everyone is fine, why are you crying?’ Sure enough, the second or third episode, a couple of people left, and I’m like, ‘It was great seeing you’ [he says it while pretending to choke back tears]. I turned into that person, but you can’t help it. You form relationships with these people.”
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Adding that one of his favorite morning hobbies became dishing about the cast with his wife over breakfast. “One of my favorite things is first thing in the mornings when we were shooting was they would send out the gossip report — the ‘hot gos report’ of all the things that are happening in the house. And my wife and I sat over breakfast every morning loving it.”
EP Michael Heyerman chimed in, “I’ve never had a host be so invested in the hot sheet that comes out the morning of.” Knoxville gushed: “I was really invested in it. Who’s trying to form a friendship, who’s backstabbing someone, is that a real romance or a showmance, did they kiss or barely kiss? I love it.”
Fox just announced that it’s bringing the show back for a second season, likely next year. That’s in addition to the announced two-part series follow-up special Fear Factor: 48 Hours of Fear, premiering May 14. Six contestants will be forced to stay awake for 48 hours while enduring intense and nonstop challenges. To which any parent who has survived the newborn phase laughs, “48 hours? Let’s see them do three weeks.” Knoxville has offered up a few suggestions about fear- and pain-inducing stunts but reluctantly reports “those are quickly struck down by the Standards and Practices person. … Apparently they don’t like bulls, to shoot with bulls.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.