Min Yoo

IT TAKES A special kind of character to volunteer to be a human target - especially when a five-minute, 25-rocket firework assault is being aimed straight at you. Fortunately for the creators of prank-show Chiseen, MTV's Asian-based Jackass rival, stuntman and martial arts specialist Min Yoo grew up doing exactly that.

He may be a Berkeley University business graduate and owner of Gough Street pizzeria New York Pizzah, but in his teenage years Yoo was a proper delinquent. Some might even say that he hasn't quite got it out of his system.

'In my neighbourhood, I was public enemy No1 when I was a kid,' confesses the South Korean-born 27-year-old, whose family moved from Seoul to the US when he was one year old. Life in Los Angeles clearly lacked inspiration by the time he hit adolescence, however.

'We were the bad kids - always getting into trouble,' he says. 'We used to steal the emergency road kits from the back of police cars. In these kits you'd have roadside flares, flare guns, police line tape. We'd also steal firemen's jackets - they were these big, thick and bulky coats made out of fire retardant materials. We'd put on these jackets and shoot each other with the flare guns from about three or four metres back, and you'd literally have huge balls of flame circling on your abdomen and chest area. That was the sort of thing we'd do for fun.'

It makes you wonder what exactly there is to do in LA if that's the case - especially as Yoo's story is all the more surprising in light of his childhood achievements.

Yoo says he became one of the youngest tae kwon do blackbelts in the US. Evidently, he sought to get his teenage kicks elsewhere.

'My parents are very traditional Korean parents,' he says. 'I remember the first time I got arrested and had to call them to pick me up from the police station. My mum was crying, bawling down the phone. When she grew up in Korea it was authoritarian, and when you got in trouble you sort of disappeared. So, she didn't know what to expect.