Motorbike tragic Ewan McGregor talks friendship, Obi Wan and why he’s up for Long Way Down Under
Ewan McGregor reveals he’s so obsessed with motorbikes that he had to make special arrangements with Baz Luhrmann when he spent eight months filming Moulin Rouge in Australia.
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Hollywood star Ewan McGregor can barely fathom life without his beloved motorbikes.
It’s not the speed or the thrill or the danger – although he’s not averse any of those things – but if he has somewhere to go and he doesn’t have one of his children in tow, he’d much prefer it was on two wheels.
“I don’t ever want to not do it,” the Scottish actor admits via Zoom call from his adopted home in Los Angeles.
“I don’t have to go out and go a million miles an hour. I like feeling the air, I like smelling the world as you go by and feeling part of it. A trip to the shops or a meeting just becomes different.”
In fact, the prolific, Golden Globe winning star of Trainspotting, Star Wars and last year’s Birds Of Prey is so attached to his preferred mode of transport that when he spent the best part of year in Sydney two decades ago filming Moulin Rouge alongside Nicole Kidman, he had to adopt some drastic measures.
Until that point in his career, as a rule he’d not been allowed to ride a motorbike while working for insurance purposes, but the prospect of such a long period of time without indulging in his passion compelled him to seek special dispensation from director Baz Luhrmann.
“I just took Baz aside and said ‘look, I don’t think you quite understand – you can’t ask me to not ride a motorbike for eight months – what are you even talking about?’,” McGregor says with a laugh.
“So, he made it happen – I don’t know how but I had a motorbike that I rode to work.”
While he says that in his heart he’s a “commuter” motorcyclist, McGregor has put his riding skills to the test in the most extreme formats in a trio of travel documentaries with his best mate and fellow bike enthusiast Charley Boorman.
In 2004, the pair travelled 31,000km overland from London to New York in Long Way Round and three years later embarked on an even more challenging journey from the tip of Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa in Long Way Down.
And last year, having drifted apart when McGregor moved to the US in 2008, the two reunited for Long Way Up which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, making their way from the bottom of Argentina, all the way through South and Central America to Los Angeles.
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Perversely, it took Boorman having a serious motorcycle accident for the pair to reunite.
After being clipped by a car in Portugal in 2017, Boorman’s left leg was shattered to the point where doctors feared they might have to amputate, leaving the adventurer and sometime actor facing a long and arduous rehabilitation.
McGregor says he was shaken by his mate’s brush with mortality and chastened by the fact that they had let their friendship slip and before long they were planning their next adventure while Boorman recuperated at home, driven by a desire to literally get back on the bike.
“It’s what we love to do,” says McGregor.
“And he has talked about it as being therapy. He had his bed downstairs in the living room because he couldn’t get up the stairs and he talks about lying in bed and seeing his motorbike outside in his drive and just going ‘I’m going to get back on that bike’.”
This time they added a degree of difficulty by opting for groundbreaking, electric Harley Davidsons that would be sorely tested as they made their way on a 21,000km journey through the remote and mountainous areas of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru.
McGregor left in September last year after wrapping Birds of Prey with Aussie Margot Robbie (“she didn’t drive me to it – Margot was great fun to work with”) and rolled into Los Angeles just before Christmas, as the coronavirus was starting to ring warning bells around the world.
After covering off North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa already, McGregor says he’d be up for an adventure around Australia, where he has spent a substantial amount of time filming Moulin Rouge, the Star Wars prequels and the Perth-shot Son Of a Gun.
“There’s still a few trips in the old dogs yet,” he says.
“We might be headed for the Long Way Down Under any time – I don’t know. You’ll just have to watch this space.”
In the meantime, though, he’s focused on an eagerly anticipated return to his Star Wars role of Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in a long-awaited TV series for Disney+.
In the first episode of Long Way Up, a staff member in a remote Argentinian hotel greets him with “may the Force be with you” and McGregor says such references are “par for the course” for the character he can’t wait to reprise.
“The new one is well in development – in pre-production now – and the plan is to start shooting at the end of February,” he says.
“So, we have a little way to go, but we are getting there. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be really good.”
Long Way Up is streaming from Friday on Apple TV+