Ewan McGregor, welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Nice to see you. Thanks for having me.
You have been in some of our favorite movies.
I mean, just, like, some of the most iconic movies.
Um, but over the past few years,
you've also taken time out of your life to just live,
I guess, every Instagramer's dream,
and that is, get on a motorbike
and just ride around a random country.
When-when did you decide that, "You know what? I'm just gonna
"take my-my vacations with a friend
and turn them into the show"?
It was... it was out of laziness, to be honest.
I mean, my friend Charley and I have known each other
since... we made this film together called Serpent's Kiss
25 years ago, 24 years ago.
And we both had just had our first children,
so we were both new dads,
and we both had this love of motorcycles.
And we-we became very fast friends.
And then I read this book that was written by somebody
who's now a friend of mine called Ted Simon,
who was a journalist for, I think, The Sunday Times,
the Radio Times, in London in the 1970s.
-And he decided to do this around-the-world trip... -Right.
...to-to write a column about traveling around the world.
And he wasn't a biker, but he decided
the best way to do it would be on the back of a bike.
So he bought... He got Triumph to supply him a bike,
and off he went.
And it took him three or four years.
And he wrote this beautiful book called Jupiter's Travels,
which I read and was just moved by,
and started daydreaming about traveling.
So we decided to do the first trip in 2004--
London to New York.
And-and the visa applications are so complicated.
Like, getting in and out of Russia two or three times,
Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia,
and we just were too lazy to do it ourselves.
So we thought, well, if we shoot this,
then we can have a little production office with people
that will do that stuff for us, and that's why...
That's sort of how it was born.
You rode 13,000 miles
through, I think it was, 13 countries.
It feels like, I mean,
you know, the coronavirus has shut that all down.
-Yeah. -Were you ready to take a break,
or could you just have kept on riding
if the whole world didn't have to come to a stop?
I could have kept going. I mean, towards the end,
I just realized that I could... this could be it for me.
You know, if I didn't have my children and marriage
to come back to, I-I could just keep going, you know.
I just... I-I like the...
I love the sort of nomadisism, if that's a word, of it.
-Right. -It's very human. It's, like, a really nice...
You wake up in the morning, you pack the bike,
and you just keep going that...
-in the vague direction you're headed in. -Mm-hmm.
At then you... at night, you find somewhere to sleep
or you put a tent up or whatever, and you...
and then, you've got it all to do again the next day.
And there's something quite lovely about it--
not knowing what's around the next corner,
not knowing who you're gonna meet.
Not knowing when the next thing
that goes wrong is going to go wrong,
and when the next person...
when it does go wrong, is gonna come and help you,
you know, 'cause it's just always the case.
You were riding electric motorbikes for the first time,
and it came with a...
it came with a different set of challenges.
Like, I-I didn't think about bikes not charging
because they're too cold sometimes.
I didn't think about, like, randomly running out of power
because-because there are no charging stations.
Two questions. Why did you choose the bikes?
Like, why did you choose to go electric?
And-and secondly, what did you notice
about riding electric through so many different countries?
In our... in our long way around trip
in 2004, and the long way down trip in 2007,
we had absolute freedom to stop wherever...
If we were riding along, and it was 4:00 in the afternoon,
we could ride off the road, and put our tents up
and then, the next morning, carry on. Well, we couldn't...
None of that huge freedom this time
because we had to have the bike plugged in somewhere.
-Right. -So that was one-one slight impact
in the experience in that we had to be in a hostel
or a hotel or somewhere where we could plug it in.
Um, but that led... the upshot of that was it led us
to meet people we would never normally have met.
Like, we were... we were stuck behind...
We were stuck between a town
we'd stopped in, in the afternoon...
This was in Chile, uh, Chile, I think, and somewhere.
And then, the town we were heading to where...
And there was nothing in between.
So we had to get to this town.
But this town was on the other side of this big mountain.
And so we start going uphill, and when you're going uphill,
you're using more power.
Then there was a head wind, and when we you got a head wind,
you're less aerodynamic.
You're not very aerodynamic on a bike anyway,
but when you've got a head wind...
-You're using more power. -You're using more power.
And at that point, I said, "I'm not going to make it."
So we were just next to this little settlement that was...
Couldn't call it a farm. It was just a little house.
It was sort of a farm-esque type place.
And we just walked up there, and knocked on this sort of gate.
And these little kids run out, and they opened the gate.
We road in. We just said to this lady
who came out of her house, "Look, we're..."
In our broken Spanish,
we're trying to ride these electric bikes
from this wire to Los Angeles,
and can we plug them in? Would you mind? And we...
You know, this is how much it costs to fill the bike up,
and we'll give you that money.
And she was quite happy to let us do it.
So we plugged in, and within two minutes,
the whole place was plunged into darkness,
all her fuses had gone.
And instead of her going, you know,
"Go, get out of here. You're ruining my electricity,"
she just... she was in the fuse box trying to help us
-to charge our bikes. -Oh. Wow!
And, um, in the end, we couldn't do it there.
We just had to thank her, and we had to backtrack
and go back to the town,
but that happened to us all the time.
You know, this...
That's one of the beautiful things about doing these trips
is that-that human interact... that human kindness
that you experience daily is so uplifting and overwhelming.
It's-it's lovely.
You were stuck. Like, when you were in Ukraine,
you were stuck at the border for, like, 12 hours.
You know, the foreign ministry had to help you out.
When you were in Mongolia, there were sheep herders
that had to help you fix one of the bikes.
You know, when you were in Kazakhstan,
you had somebody pull a handgun on you.
At that point, when someone's pulling a handgun on you,
do you not think to yourself in that moment,
all right, maybe, maybe, just maybe,
we shouldn't be riding through all of these random countries?
No, I... Two-two words in my mind
when that guy pulled the handgun,
and it was so funny looking back, because it was "Oh... no."
That was all... That was it.
It wasn't... it's wasn't...
It wasn't any more complicated than that.
I just thought, "Oh, no!" That was it.
And then, we packed it away and we drove off.
(laughter)
So funny. I mean, it was so funny
how we both tell that story, Charley and I,
because we're in this long stretch in Kazakhstan,
and there's camels for the first time.
And we've ridden from London on our motorbikes
to somewhere where there are camels.
-Mm-hmm. -So... so we thought, this was a...
We should mark this moment.
We got the bikes off the side of the road,
and, um, this car arrives from miles away.
We can see it coming, and it's full of guys, Kazakhstan guys.
They all got lots of gold teeth, I remember.
And they start smiling at us out of the window,
and they looked down at the video camera on the floor,
and then looked back at us,
and the guy in the back pulls out a handgun.
Now, in my story, he points it directly at me,
and in Charley's story, he points it directly at Charley.
-So we're both, you know... -(laughter)
But to me, he was definitely pointing at me, I think.
And, um, those were the thoughts. "Oh, no."
And then, luckily, a truck was coming from the other direction.
And, um, Charley looked over his shoulder, saw the truck,
looked back at the guys, the guys saw the truck,
and they put the gun away, and they drove off, so we were fine.
Man, I'll tell you this, it's an amazing show
because you take us to so many different countries.
We get to see how so many different people live.
I mean, from meeting child soldiers
in one part of the world
to speaking to old ladies in another. It's a beautiful show.
And honestly, my favorite part of it was just,
it made me feel like I was leaving the house
and traveling the world.
So thank you for another amazing series.
And, uh, good luck to you
when you get back out there on a bike.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Great chatting to you, Ewan.
Cheers, man, take care. Nice to talk to you.