Dax Shepard: the big laughs of a merry prankster

Interview, Sept, 2004 by Josh Klahre

As the goofy agent provocateur in the first season of Punk'd, Dax Shepard showed a nifty knack for fooling celebrities into making fools of themselves. Now he's hitting the big screen as a star of the new buddy comedy Without a Paddle, and he's all too happy to play the fool himself.

Raised on a healthy diet of The Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Shepard preferred auto shop to drama class in high school. "You could not be a theater guy and stay alive," he says of his teenage years in rural Michigan, where most of his performing entailed "getting thrown out of classrooms, getting into fights with teachers, and peeling out of the parking lot, even if no one was looking." His early aspiration to drive race cars gave way to reality, and after graduating from UCLA magna cum laude with a degree in anthropology, Shepard cut his comic teeth with a six-year stint in the Groundlings School and Groundlings Sunday Company. He then found fame, and an innate talent for mortifying the famous, on the wildly successful prankfest Punk'd, where with Ashton Kutcher at the helm, he pushed buttons as a long-lost redneck relative of Jessica Simpson and an obnoxious talent consultant to Kelly Osbourne. A star was shorn, and Shepard was on his way.

Aside from swimming in dangerous white-water rapids and engaging in three-way underpants-only spooning with co-stars Seth Green and Matthew Lillard in Paddle, Shepard was recently shooting a comedy with Office Space (1999) director and Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge, and spending his paychecks on cars. "I want to be like the modern-day Steve McQueen in my hobbies," he laughs. Maybe, just maybe, that career in race cars isn't too far off.

Josh Klahre is a writer in New York City.