2 1GT Friday September 11 2020 | the times
television
A
s Ewan McGregor
prepares to embark
on his latest
motorcycle trip for
TV, we see him in
his Los Angeles
home. He has just
said goodbye to hischildren. He knows he will be away for
three months and looks pretty glum,
so his friend and fellow traveller
Charley Boorman — whose Cheshire
cat smile would usually cheer anyone
up — studiously gives him some space.
However, given that their 13,000-
mile voyage from the southern tip
of Argentina to LA on specially
made electric Harley-Davidsons
would be the envy of any passionate
motorcyclist, it is small wonder that
they grin like teenagers when the
cameras catch them finally hitting the
road. “I love you my good friend,”
Boorman says, revving the engines in
the icy Argentine air. “I love you too,”
McGregor says. “Let’s go.”
They have already done two similar
journeys, in 2004 (Long Way Round,
which took in large parts of Russia)
and 2007 (Long Way Down, in which
they travelled south through Europe
and Africa). McGregor admits that
the pair had slightly “drifted apart”
since then.
McGregor moved to LA in 2008,
and whenever he returned to London
often found that Boorman was
working abroad. “There was no
break-up or anything,” the Scotsman
says via video link from California,
prompting his friend, who is in
London, to laugh at the very idea of
anything so silly.
They reconnected after Boorman
suffered a brutal injury at a press
event in Portugal in 2016 when his
bike was clipped by a car. He crashed
into a wall, breaking a leg, a hand
and an ankle. For McGregor it was
a “reminder not to let these special
relationships in your life drift or
go away”.
They refer to each other as their
“best friend” — as though it is an
official title — and met as actors on
a film set in 1997, when McGregor’s
star was in the ascendant after
Trainspotting. You may recall that
Boorman played the missing boy
Tommy in the 1985 movie The
Emerald Forest, which was directed
by his father, John. McGregor, 49, and
Boorman, 54. are also people who
finish each other’s sentences. So what’s
their secret? “We have our ups and
downs, and our good days and bad, but
we’re always there for each other, you
know?” McGregor says. “We love each
other, that’s the secret. That’s all it is.”
I tell them that even in today’s more
touchy-feely age it is still rare to see
men (especially middle-aged ones) use
the l-word so openly with each other.
They answer by citing a recent
interview experience when an
American journalist suggested that
they had “emasculated” themselves by
Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman
tell Ben Dowell how they have reunited
for a pan-Americas motorcycle trip
Ewan McGregor and
Charley Boorman in
their new series.
Below: McGregor and
his girlfriend, Mary
Elizabeth Winsteaddisplaying their “vulnerability” so
openly. “That’s an interesting idea,
that it’s unmasculine to feel
vulnerable,” McGregor says. “Not in
my experience.”
“I think he unmasculated himself by
saying that,” chips in Boorman, his
rather beautiful baggy eyes lighting up.
In any case they are pretty hardy.
In Long Way Up their journey is
hampered by some extreme weather
(especially in snowy, freezing
Argentina) and the logistical
complications of having to recharge
their prototype electric bikes (in cold
weather at least) every 70 miles or so.
It makes for compelling viewing, but
their bonhomie was tested almost
every day.
There’s a scene in which McGregor’s
wheels run out of charge half a mile
from a ferry they desperately need to
catch in five minutes. He is
impressively calm in a crisis. They
may be in gorgeous Patagonia, but
frequent tribulations of this nature will
feel horribly familiar to anyone who
has missed a plane or boat.
Watching McGregor pitch his tent
on dirty bits of scrubland, it is easy to
forget what a star he is. The volume
and variety of roles that he has taken
on in a nearly 30-year career are
considerable, and feel emblematic of
his hankering for adventure and
challenges. From the drug addict
Renton that made his name in
Trainspotting, to Nick Leeson in
Rogue Trader, to Obi-Wan Kenobi in
the Star Wars films, his work rate is
impressive. In the most recent series
of the acclaimed US TV series Fargo
he played a double helping of lead
roles as both of the star-crossed twins
Emmit and Ray.
Fargo also led to an upheaval in his
private life. In 2017 he was reported
to have begun a relationship with his
co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 35.
The end of his 23-year marriage to the
French production designer Eve
Mavrakis (with whom he has four
daughters aged between 9 and 24)
was reportedly finalised in the
US courts. Any questions about
his private life have been strictly
forbidden in advance, but it
doesn’t feel wildly
speculative to suggest
that his friendship with
Boorman is more precious
now than ever. Especially
when both are also prone
to joke about their
relationship as if it were
a marriage.
“There’s nobody else
in the world that I have
shared what I have
shared with Charley...
ups and downs and tough
situations and cold and
wet... and I haven’t done
that with anyone else,”
McGregor says.
The Long Way Up trip took
place between September andDecember last year, at what would
probably have been a trying time
for McGregor personally and
which perhaps also explains why
parting from his children was so
hard. How do his daughters feel
about his wanderlust?
“They don’t know us any other way,
you know,” McGregor says. “I have
spent my whole life leaving to go on
jobs and it’s not really any different.
It’s different in the nature of it, of
course, but it’s just me going off to
make a film, so everybody’s sort of
used to that. My kids have always
known me on bikes and old cars
really; it’s the way I am.”
There’s a clue to the way he is
made in his aside about the
democratic nature of the
motorcycling world. He talks of
how “when you ride and
stop at somewhere that’s
a sort of bike place you
meet people from every
walk of life and your
only commonality is
motorcycles”. Is that
the appeal? Does he
have a need to escape
the Hollywood
merry-go-round
and rough it like
us normals?
“The idea that
it feels like it’s
something to get
away from, I don’t
feel that,” he says
firmly. “My life is my
life and my work is
what I do, and I love it;I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I don’t feel like I have to escape
anything. It’s more about time; it’s
about slowing things down.”
But surely it’s nice for the man
who played Obi-Wan Kenobi to
pass unnoticed under a crash helmet?
“My life is that I am an actor and I am
recognised for some of my work, here
and there, but it’s not all the time,”
McGregor says.
“Mostly I bimble around in my life
and I am not trying to hide from
people, and I don’t worry about being
spotted; I don’t care really. So I am not
doing these trips for a desire to be
anonymous. It’s just not part of it.
It really is to do with the adventure
of it. I really like not knowing what’s
going to happen next. I really like it.
I really like not necessarily knowing
where we’re going to stay and, in this
case, where we are going to charge
the bikes... and, in a way, when things
do go wrong I have learnt to quite
enjoy it.”
McGregor says that he particularly
enjoyed the border crossings (there
were 13 countries to travel through on
this trip) and secretly hoped that he
and Boorman would get “stuck for
hours” while visa issues were being
sorted. “When do you get a chance
to knock about somewhere for a bit
in a car park?” McGregor says. “I just
like that.”
Their tenderness with each other
is touching. McGregor admits that
he spent a lot of this trip worrying
about Boorman. The Portugal smash
was bad, but another one he had
in Africa just before filming thisLong Way Up premieres
on Apple TV+ on
September 18‘We love each other. That’s
Caitlin Moran is away