Jukka Hilden of The Dudesons

I haven’t decided yet. We’ll be here for a little bit.

We met in elementary school so our families just grew up together so I guess that’s when the downhill started. That’s when we decided that we are like brothers so let’s put our stupid heads together and start coming up with these crazy things. Since then you haven’t really been able to take us apart. We’re more like family.

Yeah, that’s how we spent all our childhood together in Finland. But since we were way better at falling from our skateboard than doing actually a trick, we started liking the stunts that go bad more. We noticed that people like them a lot more so that’s where we started sticking. Also we always wanted to be a rock band but none of us can play so we started headbanging on the wall.

Yeah, that’s the youth culture we live in so we made skateboarding and snowboarding videos and after that we started filming parties that we had. Then we started showing the videos at parties. My friends enjoyed watching those and our first movie came out around 1995 and in 2000, Jarno got an idea. He was working on a cable channel in Finland called Moon TV and he got an idea that “hey guys, we should make a TV show out of this”. So we put together a pilot and all of a sudden it was the most popular show on that cable channel and then Channel 4 from Finland got interested. That took it to the next level.

I still see nightmares about the testicle mousetrap.

Yeah, it is. I don’t know why I did it but I every night I wake up shaking and cold sweat, seeing nightmares about the mousetrap chasing me. So that is the worst injury.

No. The Dudesons don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs. We decided that we get hurt enough when we are sober so we won’t do drugs. We come from Finland and during wintertime it’s so cold that you have to do something to get warm. Then during the summertime, the sun never really sets, so you just go crazy because you don’t know when to go to bed.

We get a great idea and we go with the idea. We get a car that runs and we tune it up a little bit. We don’t go and buy expensive Ferrari and do a stunt with that because we always want to do it Dudeson style. Since we don’t have as much money as they do we always come up with a great idea and we do it with the idea. Someone with a lot of money might have an idea to blow something big up but you wouldn’t have that much of an idea behind it.

One of the first stunts was probably when we filmed Fireworks War. That was way back in the day during the New Year’s Eve. We had a big pile of roman candles and we were shooting each other with them. A couple of the bullets caught my hair on fire so that was a lot of fun. It was a beautiful thing because there were so many colors around because the sun was getting down a little bit.

We have lovely women in Finland and we have a pet pig, Britney.

People know The Dudesons. They know they’re crazy and they’re excited about how we live at the Arctic Circle at the ranch, we live by our own rules and just do crazy things. For example, in Finland we’ve done live shows for over about 30,000 people with a rock band playing in the background. We’d do stunts like blindfolded boxing or shooting a shotgun into a bulletproof vest, things like that.

They’re the biggest fans of The Dudesons. At the end of the day, I don’t they can really blame us because they’re the ones that gave us the genes.

First of all, Jackass is a great show. We’re great friends with Steve-O and he and Bam [Margera] guest star on our DVD so it’s great to have their support and we love the things that they’re doing. We are always come up with original ideas and with The Dudesons it’s more about just the lifestyle that we live, all the stunts, all the pranks, all the hidden cameras just go along with it. That way it’s taken to the next level because people actually get interested in our life. Like “How the fuck does this guys survive a day when they go to the ranch and they wake up and somebody’s hitting their balls with a baseball bat and at the end of the day they burn down the ranch and during the day maybe two cars got blown up?”

There were bootleg tapes all over the world. Jarno is the one that’s always filming and editing. He showed the tapes to a friend and then he was working at a cable channel and decided that “hey guys, let’s make a show out of this lifestyle that we have and about The Dudesons.” Then after doing five years of TV in Finland, we decided that we would do an international thing. We had visited Viva La Bam a couple of times so we looked for people to distribute our DVD.

The Dudesons TV show that will be on Spike is eight half hour episodes that we’ve already produced in Finland. It has some new material and includes the most legendary Dudesons stunts. For example H-P breaks his leg in three different spots and we show the surgery and everything. There is how we accidentally burnt our house down. But The Dudesons DVD is the original Dudesons movie that has all the most hardcore things in it and is everything that we can’t show on television in the US.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck