Pioneer Stories: Charley Boorman - Adventure, Friendship and the Open Road

What does being a pioneer mean to you?

“People have asked that question before, and I’ve always sat there and thought, well, I’m not sure I did anything sort of pioneering.

When Ewan and I did Long Way Round together in 2004, people said, “You’re doing this pioneering route,” but people had done it before. I think both Ewan and I didn’t really realise what we were doing as pioneers.

I think my father is a pioneer. If you were asking someone who was a pioneer, my father was. He made films like Deliverance, Point Blank and Hope and Glory, all sorts of different movies, and he always went to incredibly difficult places to make them.

I would never see myself as one. I love to go out to new places, meet new people and do journeys that not a lot of people have done in the past. Everybody’s done everything really nowadays, it’s just how you decide to show it.

There were definitely bits of Long Way Round where we were somewhere very, very little travelled. In Far East Russia, on the Road of Bones, other bikers had done it before us, but it was difficult.

The road was built by people in the gulag camps to reach a gold mine, and there are, I think, four or five people buried in the road for every kilometre they built. The roads are still in perfect condition, but the bridges have all gone.

We had to ride through the rivers or get this big Ural truck to take the bikes across. Sometimes we used the truck as a breaker so that it would take the brunt of the force of the river while we rode across.

I suppose that was one of our more crazy expeditions and maybe that was the closest to being a pioneer. But I certainly don’t see myself as one.”

What were your earliest memories of growing up on your father’s film sets?

“When I think back at my childhood and all the places we went around the world, my father was a film director and directed lots of movies. They were always really difficult locations and challenging films to make.

Because he was the director, he would be there months before, then make the film, so we would all just go with him as a family. Knocking around on a film set and having a laugh was just what we did. I didn’t know anything else.

When he needed children in his films, he would just throw us in because we were free. He’d say, “Don’t pay for children, I’ve got four. We’ll just use them.”

The first film I was ever in was Deliverance. My father said to me, “Charley, if you sit on that sofa with that bloke, I’ll give you a tricycle.” Sounds pretty dodgy now, but I really wanted that tricycle. It was cherry red with yellow flames on the front mudguard and tassels. Maybe that’s what got me going on motorbikes, I don’t know.

We just bounced from film set to film set. That was my upbringing, but I didn’t know any better. Any of your parents have a job and you just think that’s what you do.

I was terribly dyslexic, and acting was a kind of relief from being in the classroom. It was somewhere where I could express myself. I couldn’t express myself at all in the classroom because I just didn’t know what was going on.

I think having all that travel and watching my father doing really challenging jobs and striving to do what he did encouraged me to do what I do today.”

Did growing up constantly on the move shape the way you travel today?

“I think that nomadic lifestyle has helped me with what I do today.

We were always based in Ireland, in the middle of the countryside, and then we would go off for a year here or ten months there, from Brazil to the South Pacific, South Carolina, Los Angeles or wherever the film was being made. But we would always come back to Ireland, and that’s where I started riding motorcycles.

I always had that kind of nomadic feeling. I was happy to be at home, but then when Dad had another job, I’d be really happy to head out on whatever adventure my father was doing. The whole family were a bit like that.

I think one of the nicest ways to travel is overland. You can take a flight into Marrakech and be absorbed into Morocco, but if you ride down through Spain, take the boat into Morocco and then move through there, you see everything change.

When Ewan and I went down through Sudan, it was just so hot and brutal following the Nile. Then you cross the border into Ethiopia and suddenly everything changes. The landscape, the architecture, the people, what people wear, the colour of the tarmac. The signpost colours change, how they present signposts, the shops, how petrol stations work.

It all changes on this line that someone stuck on a map however many years ago.

I love that whole part of travelling.”

Where did your love of motorcycles begin?

“My father was really big into horses. In his mind, he was the greatest horse rider of all time. The reality was that he was a bit shit at it, but we all did it together.

Then my friend Jason, Sean Connery’s son, was living in Ireland. Sean had made Zardoz with my father, and that’s how I met Jason.

There was a little Honda Monkey bike in the stables and we spent ages trying to get it going. Eventually we did. Jason was racing around on it and finally let me have a go.

Dad and Sean were standing at the top of the hill where the house was, and I came riding past them thinking I was this incredible guy. As I came past, Dad just grabbed me by the hair and pulled me off the bike. The bike carried on into a barbed wire fence and wrapped itself in barbed wire.

That was the beginning of all my crashes.

After that, I kept hearing this two-stroke noise in the village and eventually found this guy, Tommy Rochford, who had a Maico 400. At the time it was this brutal, incredible motocross bike. I convinced him to give me a go. He stuck it in first gear and let me go around the field.

Then I fell off.

That was it. I was hooked for life.

You could ride the motorcycle all day long, lean it up against a wall and just go home. Whereas with a horse, you had to muck it out, feed it, clean the stable, clean the tack and do all that kind of stuff.

Motorcycles became a real passion for me. Had I realised then how much they would dictate my life, who would have known?”

How did your friendship with Ewan McGregor become Long Way Round?

“I had been making movies and being relatively successful, but my dyslexia was getting in the way of castings.

The more film jobs I did, the bigger the roles became, and then the more castings and read-throughs you had to do because there was more responsibility. That’s when I really started to struggle.

Someone who reads normally almost reads the words from memory, just the shape of them. Whereas I have to read every single word at a time.

It started to really play on me. I’d go to castings and get terribly full of anxiety. I felt embarrassed, and then I started to shy away from them.

I spent about ten years painting and decorating and doing people’s houses up, then more and more building work. It was quite a dark period because I already had a wife and young children, and I’d had this idea of the life I was going to have which had sort of been taken away from me. I felt like I’d let everybody down, my wife, myself and my children.

During that time I would still occasionally get asked to do a film, and one of those was The Serpent’s Kiss. Ewan was in it.

I’d heard that he’d ridden a motorbike to California, so the first conversation we ever had was about motorcycles.

We became great friends. We started running a motorbike race team together in British Superbikes and racing in British Superstock. We had David Jefferies and Matt Llewellyn and smashed it that year, coming first and second in the championship. We spent this fantastic year running around, having a laugh and loosely helping with the motorbike race team.

Then we started doing more and more things together, loads of track days and all sorts of stuff.

One day Ewan said, “I’ve got this idea. Do you want to come out to the house?”

I came out and he had this map. We were meant to be going down to the south of Spain to meet our families, and he said, “Forget all that. Why don’t we go to China?”

I thought, “Oh, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then China became the Road of Bones and when we got to Vladivostok we thought, why don’t we just go on to Alaska, Canada and New York?

Quite honestly, when we got it together, I didn’t have any money. I had absolutely fuck all in my bank account. I remember leaving London with my wife, two children, a mortgage, a roof extension being done to the house which I couldn’t afford and £5,000 in the bank.

I made a deal with Ewan, Russ and Dave that I got a weekly salary which was paid to my wife so she had money to carry on.

We got a book deal quite quickly. Two guys going off riding around the world, not knowing what’s going to happen, great for a book. TV was a much harder sale because if you said to a TV station, “It’s two guys going off around the world and we have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen,” that’s not necessarily great for a TV show.

Sky One had actually declined it at first. Then James Baker, my brother-in-law at the time, who was running Sky One, came to our leaving party. We had loops playing of all the stuff we had already filmed during the preparation.

He came in, saw it and said, “I get it, Charley. Tomorrow morning you’ll have a contract.”

At ten o’clock the next morning, a courier arrived with the contract.

Then off we went.

I have a lot to thank Ewan for because my life wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to. Because of his enthusiasm, his friendship and because he really wanted to make it happen, that changed my life.”