I Am Jack Osbourne...
Son of the Prince of Darkness, Jack Osbourne entered the public eye when his family was thrust into the limelight through The Osbournes. Despite being somewhat of a teenage tearaway during his early role as reality TV celebrity Jack Osbourne has experienced a lot in his 23 years. He’s successfully fought an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and now presents his own television series Jack Osbourne: Adrenaline Junkie, taking a group of celebrities on the toughest adrenaline challenges across the world. The new series begins on Tuesday 15th September at 9pm on ITV2.
Kerrang!: What people do you think have influenced you the most in your life?
Jack Osbourne: For me it was very much my friends and family really. Oddly enough, Whitfield Crane used to be the singer of Ugly Kid Joe, he was like my big brother when I was growing up, it was really strange. I didn’t have an older brother and he did a tour with my dad in 1990, and I looked up to him, we used to hang out all through my childhood. I think I definitely looked up to my parents a lot. I notice that I do certain things because of the way that they do it. It’s weird that things turn out like that when you start analysing your character and realise what characteristics each parent gave you.
K!: You’re obviously an Osbourne and you grew up in a very famous family, what’s it like having a very famous father?
Jack: It was strange. I did always know that my dad was famous, but I didn’t understand what I think it meant at the time. I just thought that’s what dads did, and then when I started going to school, around 4 or 5, you start realising that not all kid’s dads do that. It definitely set me aside from the other kids at school, which I did have a hard time with initially, because kids would come up and say stuff. But I always thought it was fun. I got to go to a lot of cool places and my mum was a big fan of keeping the family together as much as possible, so there would be extended periods when I wasn’t actually at school and on the road with my dad, hanging out with Whitfield Crane!
K!: When you went round to friends houses, did you think “they’ve not got the same rules that we’ve got”?
Jack: Going to friends’ houses was always interesting. I definitely did notice a big difference between my family and my friends’ families. I didn’t really dwell on it that much at such a young age. Obviously when I got older I realised, massively, how different things actually were. All my friends’ parents had nine to five jobs and dinner was on the table by seven kind-of-thing, and my house was just absolute chaos all the time. But since, I think my parents are some of the only parents that are still together, from all of the kids that I went to school with, so my parents are obviously doing something right.
K!: When you were really young, your dad went through his worst period.
Jack: I do remember going to school after the whole strangling incident with my dad and mum. That whole thing happened and I remember kids saying stuff to me at school about it, but I think that you think when you’re a kid that’s normal because you don’t know anything else. I did get picked on quite a bit though, people would come and say. It wasn’t like my dad was Chesney Hawkes and everyone loved him - my dad was Ozzy Osbourne and people loved to hate him!
K!: Do you have any memories of your dad being sent away?
Jack: I remember the police turning up and I remember obviously some drama and commotion and yelling and all that, but I don’t really remember too much after all that. I just remember sitting on the balcony of the landing looking down at the police cars and the flashing lights and my mum and all that, and the nanny was there. It was a bit full on I think, overload for a kid; you don’t really know what it’s all about.
K!: Did things change after that at home?
Jack: I think home life was really a lot of peaks and valleys. There were really good times when it was all mellow and then all of a sudden things would kick off and, I mean it still is that way really, it goes in cycles.
K!: You moved countries, skipping back and forth. How did that affect you?
Jack: My best friend, who I work with now, he’s been my best friend since I was 2 years old, so we’ve managed to stay in pretty good contact. I have got a small, solid group of friends that I’ve known more or less my whole life. I think because they were my friends, I really had to make an effort. Even though we did move back and forth from the States to England, we always lived in the same areas, so it wasn’t like one minute I was living in Bristol and then down in Cornwall or up in San Francisco - it was either Los Angeles or London really. So I managed to keep my friends in both places.
K!: When did you first move to Los Angeles?
Jack: We first moved to America when I was 6 and back when I was 7, and then again for a couple of months when I was 10, and then permanently when I was 12.
K!: And you’ve still got a friend from back then?
Jack: Yeah, well my friend in the States was actually my roommate. His father worked for my family for 26 years and we grew up together, in diapers together and that kind of thing. He’s in the States and my other friend Jamie here, we were at nursery together. So I’ve definitely got old friends.
K!: You started working for your mum’s record company and you started drinking around the same time - could you tell us a bit about what it was like moving in adult circles?
Jack: I think ever since I was a kid, I’d always get taken on the road with my dad and I was around a really adult world. I was in an adult world basically and just sitting around looking at things like, what’s going on? I always wanted to be a part of it, ever since I was a kid I was like, “I can’t wait to be an adult, I hate being a kid.” I now wish I was still a kid; the toys they have now are amazing! School wasn’t a massive thing for me, I just hated it, I was always getting in trouble because I was dyslexic and had a really hard time there. But when I was about 13, 14, music really became a huge thing in my life and I started helping my mum out with Ozzfest and finding vans for them and things like that. One thing led to another and I ended up interning at Virgin Records at 14 and getting hired at Epic at 15 in the A&R department as a scout and school became less and less of a priority and I spent a lot of time going out to rock bars all over L.A., trying to find bands.
K!: What sort of people did you have coming to your house when you were younger?
Jack: My dad’s not really a massively social person, he doesn’t really hang out with too many musicians and stuff, because I think he has a hard time relating to them in the sense of, he doesn’t walk around holding himself as this artiste and he’s got that very sort of working class mentality when it comes down to music. So when I was young, there wasn’t really anyone crazy coming over. Occasionally it was Bon Jovi and Lita Ford. It was basically these big people that my mum used to work with and manage. The reason why they’d be around wasn’t really so much for my dad. But in my teenage years, Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie and all those guys, we used to hang out with a lot. That’s probably what I remember the most, hanging out with Phil from Pantera, talking about horror movies. As a kid, that was always fun.
K!: How did they treat you? You were quite young.
Jack: I was 13 years old hanging out with Phil and, like I said, talking about horror movies. They were all really cool with me.
K!: Is it fair to say that people involved in the world of metal are actually quite a friendly bunch?
Jack: I think what people don’t realise is that all these really heavy metal people are dorks. They’re all like super intelligent, incredibly well read most of them, and they enjoy drinking and partying, and making really heavy music. I think for me, some of the funnest times in my life are from about 12 to 16, when it was so carefree, just cruising around and making friends and Ozzfest was really kicking off. We used to call Ozzfest summer camp because kids would go to summer camp and I’d go on tour with my dad and hang out at this travelling metal festival. It was pretty fun.
K!: We’ve read that even though you were so young, you were given special privileges to go in anywhere even though you were under 21, is this true?
Jack: The way around that was that in L.A., all the clubs where bands play are all ages, you just have to show your ID to get a wrist band to drink, and after a while I became friends with all the owners there and they didn’t really care after a while. They’d known my mum for a while and it was very relaxed, so they didn’t really mind if I was having a drink here or there, or quite regularly! I’d be pissed off if my kid was doing what I was doing!
K!: When you look back on it, do you think that was possibly a bad environment for you?
Jack: Definitely. There’s sometimes parts where I shake my head about what I was doing. But I don’t necessarily think it was bad, I actually think it was quite necessary, I think it’s part of why I was almost accepted into that kind of crowd really, because I wasn’t afraid to get stuck in and play with the big boys. The mentality that I think a lot of these guys had was a “smoke this, drink this, and come check this band out” kind of thing. It’s very much the culture that goes with heavy music and that’s where I was focusing a lot of my attention.
K!: Were you hanging around more with older people than people your own age?
Jack: Absolutely. All my friends were older, and John, the drummer from System of a Down, he was probably one of the more positive influences, because he didn’t drink and he took me under his wing for a while. We used to go to comic book conventions all the time. He was my best friend for a long time.
K!: “The Osbournes” TV show came into your life. Do you remember when that first started, and what your reactions were?
Jack: The idea to do something with MTV popped up in early 2001. Originally, MTV just wanted to meet with me and Kelly, to do VJ stuff. Then we all sat down and it evolved. Back then, you didn’t really have reality as to what it is now, it was “let’s do a Real World with the Osbournes”, and originally that’s what it was going to be called, it was going to be called The Real World: Osbournes. A lot of talks came up and it disappeared and then it would come up again, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing from my mum one week and then me and Kelly and dad, and Amy never wanted anything to do with it.
So one minute it was happening, one minute it wasn’t until finally - it must have been late August, early September 2001, because I remember it was right around 9/11 - that we were told that it’s definitely going to happen. Because our house was being built at the time and we were living in a rental house, they were allowed permission to go in and start wiring the house up while it hadn’t been finished. So they wired it all up for cameras as the house was being built.
Originally it was only supposed to be a pilot, we were supposed to film for three weeks for one pilot episode and then see what happened, and it went from there. But we really didn’t know what we were getting into. Things are always peaks and valleys with the family, and I think at that time, it wasn’t a good time. I think things were getting pretty crazy again with my dad and I think Kelly and I were becoming a little more aware of how our family might be perceived. It was a bit like, “what are we getting ourselves into?”
K!: How was that? Even before you get to it being broadcast, how was it just having camera crews around? How did that change your life?
Jack: I remember the first day we started filming at the house; it was the day we moved in actually. The first night we spent there was when the cameras turned were on and it was really quite surreal. Kelly and I just sat there and we were just being filmed. I remember her bedroom had this crazy lip-shaped couch - it was something you could easily see Kelly having - and we just sat there with a friend of ours, just talking. We’d look up and there’d be two camera guys and two sound guys literally on the other side of the room filming with these big lights. We were looking at them and they were looking at us!
Then, after a while, you got to know the production team a little bit better, and the camera guys and sound guys. After a couple of weeks, you barely noticed. It was interesting at school though, because at this time I was in high school, I didn’t really tell them about it, but then when they see you getting dropped off at school with a full camera crew behind you waving you off to school they’re like, “what is that all about?” And you’re like, “don’t ask!”
K!: Do you remember seeing it when it was first broadcast? Were you surprised at how they edited you?
Jack: I just never thought that what was being filmed would be on TV. For some reason it just never computed that people are going to see this. I just thought nothing of it. I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere. I was a huge Tenacious D fan at the time and I kept telling MTV, “We have to get Tenacious D to do the trailers!” And they managed to get Tenacious D to do three trailers where Jack Black and Kyle Gass were dressed up as my dad and Randy Rose or Zack. They did these crazy songs, and it was at that point that I realised, wait a second, this show might have some weight behind it, because we just got Tenacious D to do our trailers! I remember the night the show aired and how I was normal, high school kid one day and then the next it was different.
K!: How did you feel seeing yourself on TV?
Jack: Sometimes I felt that what they were showing was like me, and other times, I just thought “that’s so not what happened!” The thing is, everyone always thought that The Osbournes was scripted, and it’s not like we were ever scripted, but the edit was. You can do amazing things with editing anything; you can make the tone of something completely different or make things appear to be completely what they’re not.
In the first episode, I have three different hair-dos, and I can’t believe no-one ever really picked up on that! How can this one story be followed through three different hair-dos? And they were completely out of order, it’s not like one minute I had long hair, then short, then even shorter, it was short, long, half cut, weird. So when they would do stuff like that, it would really frustrate me; when they would embellish things that weren’t as big of a deal as they were, but sometimes it was more or less as it was.
K!: What were the positive benefits of it at the time for you?
Jack: At the time, I thought the positive benefits were that I got loads of women, I could get into any bar I wanted, and I was getting paid! That was actually, honestly, the only reason at the time I was doing it. I was 15, you don’t actually think about things like getting paid to be filmed at home, it doesn’t pop into your head, and it wasn’t until we’d been filming for three weeks that it actually clocked into my head that, wait a second, this is going to be on TV and I went up to my mum and I was like, “why are we doing this?” and she’s like, “well…”, and I was like, “am I getting paid?” and she’s like, “yes.” And she told me at the point before we’d signed anything and I thought it was an astonishingly high figure, I was like, “oh my god, that’s amazing!” It was something like forty thousand dollars or something, for a 15 year old that’s epic, and I was like, “oh my god!” So I was like, “amazing! Great! I’m in! Fantastic! I’m going to go and buy a car or something with it!” Although it sounds slightly hollow, sorry, I only did it for the money!
K!: At the same time, do you think that being in the program contributed to you ending up in rehab? Do you think it lead you to drinking?
Jack: I think my ending up in rehab would have happened eventually, because even before we were filming, I got in trouble at school for smoking pot and drinking and getting other kids high on weekends, things like that. I went through phases. From about aged five to ten, I was a good, popular kid at school. I did get made fun of a little bit, but I had my group of friends. Then from ten to about 13, I was a complete dork, just the dorkiest kid. I used to watch Star Trek every night and Star Wars was beyond dork! I used to wear sweater vests and polo shirts and I had a nice comb over - it was horrible! And then, when I discovered music, that’s when I started drinking and doing what came with that whole heavy metal world. So I think it was going to happen eventually, whether it happened when I was 17 or 27. I think at some point I probably would have ended up in rehab.
K!: What happened when you ended up in rehab for the first time? Were you drinking ridiculous amounts of alcohol for how old you were?
Jack: It’s amazing what people will let you get away with when they know who you are. It was to the point where the show was such a huge phenomenon because it was the first of its kind at the time, and it was this weird mania. I would walk down the street in New York and people were dragging me in to bars to buy me drinks and give me drugs. I can remember me and my friend PJ just walking around going, “what is going on?” People following us, it was nuts, it was really exciting, when you think about it now, but back then it was just so overwhelming, and because I was hanging out with a fast paced older crowd, and a bunch of skaters and musicians, that was the world that they were in and we fed off each other. The harder they would drink, the harder I would have to drink, and the harder I would drink, they would drink, and then it would be the same with the drugs. It was literally like a tornado. Then my mum got sick, and with this huge amount of success from the show, I felt like basically I could have done anything and it would have been okay. So that’s what I was doing.
K!: Who helped you in the end?
Jack: I noticed that my real friends no longer wanted anything to do with me because I was in such a way and I’d gone so far beyond just a crazy Friday or Saturday night out, it would become non stop everyday drinking and getting really full on. I ended up hanging out with people who are still my really good friends today, they ended up getting sober and stuff, but a really, pretty heavy group of guys. It wasn’t just the occasional pot smoking and the odd pill here and there.
My mum got better, she was given the all clear from cancer, this was around April of 2003, and I was just massively strung out on opiates. I think I’d drank everyday for two and a half years at this point, and a friend of mine called my mum and basically said, “listen, Jack’s in a horrible way, you might not be aware because of what’s going on but he’s bad.” And my mum approached me a week or two later, because she had to figure it out for herself, and she told me I was going to go to rehab and I took off running, just disappeared for a crazy, blackout weekend. I don’t really remember too much of it, and then eventually I was like, alright, I’m done with this, I can’t really do this anymore, and I came home and felt really just done with. So I guess it wasn’t really any one person that helped me get myself together, it was a series of events that led up to me wanting to get better.
K!: Did you nearly die at one point?
Jack: There were a few times. Ever since I was about 14, I suffered from depression. I started becoming really suicidal and trying to purposefully overdose on pills. There were times when a friend pulled me out of a swimming pool, because I’d passed out and fallen into a swimming pool. There were all sorts of stupid, dangerous things that you wake up the next morning going, “how did I pull that one off?” When my mum told me that I had to go to rehab and I took off, that whole weekend was just one last hurrah before what I knew had to happen. Always good to go out with a bang!
K!: Was that it?
Jack: Yeah, I think the last time I did drugs was April 20th 2003.
K!: How did rehab change your life? How long were you there for?
Jack: I was in treatment for 56 days. It makes you look at yourself. Obviously you stop taking the drugs and drinking, and they give you a lot of work to do on yourself. They educate you on what goes on with you and what the effects are on your body and your mind. It’s like intense therapy. It’s not necessarily psychotherapy, you’re not in a room with a bunch of wizards and they’re not asking you how you felt at that specific second. You work at your own pace and you do what you have to do in order to find what you think’s going to work. They only suggest things and usually, if you follow the suggestions, it ends up working. I got a lot out of it, it was probably one of the better things that I ever did with myself.
K!: So you came out and then your life seemed to completely take a different direction and you started Adrenaline Junkie. How did that stuff all begin? Did the idea come from you to get fit, or did it come from a TV company?
Jack: It was strange, because I’d been sober for about 20 months at the time. A very common thing for people who get sober is that they just feel lost; they’re like, “now what?” I put on loads of weight and I was just this dorky, crazy kid. What I’d spent that 20 months doing was completely immersing myself in 12 step recovery. I was going to meetings regularly and I was basically trying to do whatever it took to stay sober and that’s where all my focus was, just sobriety.
Then after a while I was like, “okay, I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on this”, now it’s time to go out and figure out what I want to do. I had the opportunity to do this show called Extreme Detox. They took groups of celebrities off to different parts of the world to go and do these different retreats. The one that I picked was rock climbing and doing meditation and t’ai chi in these Slovakian mountains. I went to the shoot and got on really well with all the production team and became really good friends with a guy called Mike Weeks, who was one of the producers and one of the safety climbers. I seemed to take pretty well to the climbing. I was 225 pounds - obviously I couldn’t climb like an absolute star - but I was doing alright for myself, I thought. I was talking with Mike and he explained that he studied nutrition and that he was a professional climber at one point. He asked me if I’d ever heard of a place called El Capitan in Yosemite. As things evolved it came out that he’d had this idea for a show about training someone to climb El Cap and he asked me if I was interested and I was like, “that sounds amazing!” One thing led to another, we exchanged information and kept in contact and I think it was a year later I was climbing El Cap with him, and that’s how it all started with Adrenaline Junkie. So that one trip to Slovakia ended up being just as life changing trip as my trip to rehab.
K!: Climbing El Capitan, was that the biggest challenge you’d ever faced in your life?
Jack: Physical challenge, definitely. It was a long week I’ve got to say! It’s very, very tough and you’re dealing with a lot of different elements. I feel in hindsight it was almost a coming of age thing. So many cultures have these coming of age crazy things that they do and it seems like in the Western world now, coming of age is going down to a pub, getting wasted and getting into a bar fight, that’s what adult men do now!
But for me, I felt like I needed to do more, and climbing became a huge passion for. Since then I’ve also had time to dwell on it. A huge part of me wanting to do Adrenaline Junkie was to stick it to people. For so long I’d been put in this box of bratty, drunk, fat Osbourne child, and it’s not who I was and it’s not who I’ve become since I got sober, that just wasn’t me.
K!: The Adrenaline Junkie stuff seems to go hand in hand with remaining on the wagon - has it helped?
Jack: I think that when you get sober and when you stop doing drugs, a lot of people experience a void. They have their recovery groups that they go to, but for me, I felt like I’d got a pretty good grasp on the whole being able to control my desire to drink and not drink and do what I had to do. But it felt like I had to go out and explore and fill a void that I now had created since the lack of excitement from the drugs and alcohol.
K!: What did your parents think of all this, because it’s just as much a worry in a different way?
Jack: My parents are in a really awkward position, because during this whole getting sober thing they were super supportive and they’re obviously pretty happy that I wasn’t the way I was, but it freaked them out when I went to another extreme! When it went from three day benders with no phone call and turning up in a shambles, to disappearing for three-week climbing trips with a bunch of people they don’t know, in foreign countries, climbing god-know- what and doing all this craziness! I think the first time they got a taste of it was when we’d gone to stay at Elton John’s house in the South of France, and it was meant to be this 2 week nice vacation in Nice with Elton and friends. It’s an amazing place. Four days into it, I came down and I was like, “alright, I’m going to Croatia to go climbing, bye!” They were like, “oh, okay.” I got a cab to the airport and just disappeared and I think they were a little freaked out by that, that it had gone from one thing to the next.
K!: What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done on the program? Not just in terms of stunts, but is there also the threat of you being a target for kidnapping?
Jack: The kidnap threat is always something that, no matter where you are, could happen. You could walk out of here and get thrown in the back of a truck. It’s tough, because there’s different kinds of dangerous. On the last shoot for example, we were doing freediving - it’s when you hold your breath and swim down to crazy depths, and I blacked out under water and just fainted. Someone was right there to grab me though, but that’s pretty dangerous!
Probably the most dangerous thing we’ve ever encountered is nature, and the weather. We were climbing this mountain in Canmore in Alberta, Canada and just before we summited, a big lightning cloud came in. So you’re standing at 13, 14 thousand feet up this huge towering mountain, and you’re inside a cloud that’s statically charging, you can hear the buzz of electricity! There’s nothing you can really do about that, just hope that it passes quickly, but if it strikes the summit of the mountain, and we were about 200 metres from the summit, it can travel down and fry you. There’s a lot of things that we’ve done which are sometimes by the skin of our teeth really!
K!: How have your relationships with your family changed over the years? Have you ever been embarrassed by anything your family has done?
Jack: Yeah. It’s very tough having a family that you have and then there’s a public perception of your family. So there is this strange balance of things and I sometimes forget that my parents’ actions don’t just disappear. With my dad, I’ve grown up with that, but when things started happening with myself, and sister and mum, things get difficult.
There’s definitely a lot of embarrassing stuff. I always found X-Factor with my mum hard to deal with, just because who she is perceived as on television is not necessarily who she is to me. Just like when my dad’s on stage. At home, my dad is dad, he’s not Ozzy Osbourne. So I had a hard time getting used to the fact that my mum now had a public persona she’d created for herself, but also she was my mum. And with my sister as well, and I’m sure them with me. Things definitely were hard at times. “Why did you say that?” You know, “what’s this all about? Why didn’t you speak to me about this?” So it can be tough at times, especially when my mum or sister come out with something in the press. I don’t really worry that much about my dad, he’s been doing it so long he’s got his routine down pretty well when it comes down to talking about things, but my mum and sister are a bit of a loose canon every now and then - they’ll just blurt stuff out and it can have quite an effective backlash.
K!: There can’t be many other families who read about what each other have been doing in the papers.
Jack: It’s always interesting! The thing that probably ticked me off the most was reading in the newspaper how my mum and dad had agreed upon euthanizing in Switzerland if one of them got terminally ill. I was like, “when were you going to talk to us about that?” and mum’s like, “well, it’s your father and I’s decision,” this and that, and I’m like, “well, yeah, so you’ll talk to a seedy reporter about it, but not your own kids?” Things like that get frustrating, but like I said, I think essentially what we do is entertainment and I think my mum and sister are very conscious of that whereas me, I’m sometimes like, “well, okay then,” just jump off something, that’s my job! I think they’re a little more savvy in the entertainment aspect of things and about making things entertaining, whereas it’s just not really my thing, I now get that, that some things are done for entertainment’s sake.
K!: You’re only 23, what are your ambitions? What have you got planned for your foreseeable future?
Jack: I’ve started producing. I’m doing a documentary on my dad right now that hopefully will be done by September, and I want to get more into the production side of things and the more creative side, just because I’ve been on TV enough now, I’m done!
