Meet Jackass the Sophisticated Dude; You Want Rowdy and Moronic? Johnny Knoxville Is Poised and Bookish, if You Please (original) (raw)
Movies|Meet Jackass the Sophisticated Dude; You Want Rowdy and Moronic? Johnny Knoxville Is Poised and Bookish, if You Please
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- Nov. 4, 2002
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November 4, 2002
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Section E, Page
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The maître d'hôtel at La Grenouille was expressionless as he scanned Johnny Knoxville's scuffed leather jacket and baggy maintenance-man slacks. ''Peut-être celui-ci,'' Armel Gren murmured, coaxing a navy blazer over his guest. With a polka-dotted ascot, arranged to conceal sweater holes, the star of ''Jackass the Movie'' was fit to enter the dim, hushed, crimson-and-gold dining room of one of the finest and stuffiest restaurants in New York.
J'Accasse the Lunch.
It was painful to watch.
Mr. Knoxville sipped a 1999 Baron'arques. He folded his napkin on his lap. He chose the correct fork.
He murmured ''merci,'' after the waiter, in black tie, recited the menu du jour to him in French. He took a polite bite of the house specialty cuisses de grenouille and did not spit out his escargots or gargle his ris de veau.
The much-concussed 31-year-old drama-school dropout, who was knocked unconscious by a 320-pound professional boxer named Butterbean in one segment of the movie and strapped rockets to his roller skates in another, prefers Flannery O'Connor to Hemingway (''too macho'').
When asked about Amsterdam, he described the Van Gogh Museum, not the legal marijuana bars. ''Pot makes me dizzy,'' he confided. In Paris, he prefers the Rodin Museum.
Giuseppe Tornatore's ''Cinema Paradiso'' and ''A Face in the Crowd,'' a 1957 film directed by Elia Kazan, written by Budd Schulberg and starring Andy Griffith and Lee Remick, are two of his favorite films.
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